Notes from the sketch book

July is here, and with the longest day now behind us, I've been reflecting on the films I've experienced for the first time since the start of the year.  Some are old classics which until now I just hadn't got around to viewing, there were a few near misses, films that, while interesting, just didn't quite make my final selection. These included the distinctive Australian film The Surfer starring the equally unique Nicolas Cage, the somewhat anticlimactic Nosferatu, the ambitious Mickey 17, and the 1980s cult classic, Night of the Comet. There's a particular quality that elevates a film beyond...

The cinematic dialogue between the American Western and the Japanese Jidaigeki (period drama) forms one of the most fascinating instances of cross-cultural fertilization in film history. This epilogue returns to the genesis of that exchange, which served as a foundational premise for the past few months of articles on Clint Eastwood's evolution within the Western genre.  These notes from the sketchbook examines Lee Sang-il's 2013 Japanese Jidaigeki, Yurusarezaru Mono (literally A Thing That Can't Be Forgiven) not merely as a remake but as the closing of a cinematic circle, where a quintessential Western, itself born from Japanese inspiration, is reinterpreted...

Gene Hackman, in a performance that rightly earned him an Oscar, carves Little Bill Daggett into something far more unsettling than your run-of-the-mill villain. In fact it wouldn't be a stretch to see this movie as having two main protagonists akin to another 90s film ‘Heat’, Daggart fancies himself a keeper of the peace, a man who lays down the law – no guns allowed in his town and takes a certain gruff pride in wearing that sheriff’s badge. He’s even building a house, a solid, grounded thing, a symbol of settling down, of domesticity. Except, like the man himself,...

Clint Eastwood, grizzled and carrying the weight of a violent past like a worn saddle, plays William Munny, a widowed pig farmer coaxed out of retirement for one last, bloody job. Two cowboys have disfigured a prostitute, and her fellow women have pooled their meager earnings to hire someone to deliver justice – or rather, revenge.   The opening and closing images of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) linger: a lone house, a solitary tree, silhouetted against a vast, indifferent sky, often bathed in the melancholic light of sunset or twilight. Most importantly there's a grave marker, Claudia’s name a constant...

Ryan Coogler, a filmmaker who has already demonstrated a keen eye for the intersection of genre and social commentary, now plunges us into the humid, fraught landscape of the 1930s Mississippi Delta with Sinners.  The following are kind of spoilers if you haven't seen the trailer or know nothing about the plot of the film. Sinners follows twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, both embodied with a simmering intensity by Michael B. Jordan who delivers Smoke and Stack with distinct personalities while also hinting at the unbreakable bond between them. They return to their rural hometown ostensibly to escape a past...