Smashbomb

"Rififi is a strange animal, based on a novel by a typically French crime writer, Auguste Le Breton, and shot in Paris as the first foreign-language film by a great American filmmaker at the height of his powers, whose career had been broken by McCarthyism. Jules Dassin’s previous film, made in London five years earlier, Night and the City, is his masterpiece. This inspired hybrid of French and American noir—which I discovered as a child on French TV—has constantly impressed me with its violence, its despair, its darkness, and its beauty. It has also been hugely influential, not only on Melville—so much of his work derives from Rififi—but also on a lot of minor figures of French genre. Dassin reinvented the whole syntax, and the after-effects have been felt for a long time. I am a fan of Michael Mann; he is one of the most inspired stylists in American cinema today, but it was all there from the start. In Thief, his first feature, you have echoes of Melville (it goes full circle), a sharp eye for realism, but also profound human characters with precisely drawn relationships, and great acting. Mann’s fascination with a geometrical modernity, even if it is always mediated by genre filmmaking, is genuinely reminiscent of Antonioni—explicitly so in the last scenes of Heat."

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Kudos

LoganCrews (2861 KP) rated Tigers are Not Afraid (2017) in Movies

Oct 5, 2020 (Updated Oct 5, 2020)

Tigers are Not Afraid (2017)

2017 | Crime, Drama, Fantasy, Horror

6.0

(1 Ratings)

Movie Rating

I initially found this to be uncommonly touching but no sooner does it fall into the draining rhythm of the rest of these sad realism/fantasy metaphor films. Still cloying as can be but a reasonable amount of mostly unaffected emotional scenes do make it out of the wreckage with this one, and after all it's still vastly better than 𝘉𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘥 and 𝘗𝘢𝘯'𝘴 𝘓𝘢𝘣𝘺𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘩 combined because it's visually divine without being cut down to scraps via obnoxious handheld gimmick (which this still has but it's much more restrained, sort of works here, and is actually visible for once) or an eyesore color palette that resembles somebody smearing mud all over the lens like either of those two. As is usual for the genre there isn't near enough depth or fantasy parts for this to be fully successful, but the child performers are all marvelous and the horror/fantasy that is here is quite masterful - the effects and art design are just awesome. If this was interested in being its own deal rather than ripping off practically every single trope you can find in these types of movies then we'd really be in business. But as it stands, it's still far above the pack in comparison to the rest of them - as if that's even a high bar to begin with.