Of all the curdled classics made during the neo-noir wave of the Seventies and early Eighties - including Klute, The Long Goodbye, Mean Streets, Chinatown, The Conversation, Night Moves, Farewell My Lovely, Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and The Postman Always Rings Twice - Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way is the most neglected.
AI Bezzerides, who scripted Kiss Me Deadly (1955) for director Robert Aldrich, thought Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel was trash. Spillane, offended that Bezzerides changed so much, couldn’t understand why the film became a cult favorite in France; one of its admirers was François Truffaut, who tracked down Bezzerides and congratulated him in a phonecall. Depicting the search of the bedroom peeper Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) for “the Great Whatsit” - narcotics in the book, a box of fissionable material on screen - Aldrich’s film is a Cold War masterpiece that deconstructed Spillane’s vigilante dick and the right-wing values he espouses by making him materialistic, anti-intellectual, impotent, and even more sadistic and misogynistic than he is on the page.
A nostalgified panacea of pine, tinsel, and tintinnabulation? Or a black hole of loneliness, bitterness and melancholy? Films about Christmas, wholly or partially, have straddled both polarities over the years, producing a surprising number of classics. In compiling this list, I hummed and hahed over Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa (2003), starring Billy Bob Thornton as a hard-drinking (if redeemable) misanthrope who poses in the red suit and white beard to get at a department store’s Christmas takings.
The fifth collaboration between iconic French actress Isabelle Huppert and director Benoît Jacquot tells the story of Ann (Huppert), a concert pianist who leaves her partner of 15 years after she sees him passionately kiss another woman. She decides to abandon her life, leaving no trace of her previous existence, and only one friend, Georges (Jean-Hugues Anglade), is allowed to know her plans. She has met Georges for the first time since childhood by a ridiculous contrivance but, as with so much in this film, it helps to go with the flow because Huppert, who appears in almost every scene, is so compellingly watchable.
The opening scene of Martin Scorsese's new film - a storm-tossed ferry buffeting its way to an isolated island off America's East Coast - bears an unmissable resemblance to that of Roman Polanski's The Ghost. So too does its premise, of a vulnerable young man who falls under the sway of a powerful, indefinably sinister older one.