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3 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Each of the films collected in Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers by Alain Corneau emphasize the possibilities and discrepancies between reality as it is and as the protagonists see it or want it to be. Like so many leads in noirs and neo-noirs alike, these men are plagued by big, unattainable dreams and are left grasping at any hope or freedom they can find, only to be inevitably confronted by the harsh truth that everything good is fleeting.
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3 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
For a spell, François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming plays like the type of low-key drama that aims more to comfort viewers than challenge them. Set primarily in a small village in the French countryside, the film treats us to plenty of pretty, bucolic shots of its elderly protagonist, Michelle (Hélène Vincent), going for walks in the woods with her best friend, Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko), picking mushrooms, and preparing meals.
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4 weeks ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Jason Statham’s Levon Cade isn’t just a simple “working man.” Sure, he’s putting in the sweat equity as a foreman at his friend Joe’s (Michael Peña) construction company, but it’s not long into David Ayer’s film before we learn of his past as a highly trained and decorated member of the British military.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Released the year before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Karen Shakhnazarov’s absurdist satire Zerograd captures the disorientation and terror of gradually coming to realize that you live in a reality you no longer recognize. Arriving in a remote city in order to get a replacement for his company’s dysfunctional air conditioning unit, ordinary worker Alexei (Leonid Filatov) expects a short, uneventful visit before returning to Moscow.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
The 1969 Czech anthology film Prague Nights consists of a trio of tales of lust, revenge, and feminine wiles, each infused with a singular combination of the macabre, the grotesque, and the comically sensual in depicting some of the darkest and most mysterious aspects of Czech culture.
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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith |Derek Smith
A careful balancing act between character study and romantic comedy, Joan Micklin Silver’s 1988 film Crossing Delancey strikes a beguilingly effervescent tone in spite of its main character, Izzy (Amy Irving), being so prickly and intransigent. This can largely be attributed to Silver and screenwriter Susan Sandler’s willingness to depict Izzy as a woman who lives life on her own terms, discovering herself as she discovers her power.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
The elaborate heist that kicks into motion early into Dominik Graf’s The Cat effectively douses the steamy sex scene that opens the film with ice cold water. As the well-tanned, brawny Probek (Götz George) stands naked at the window of the low-lit hotel room in which he’s just gotten his rocks off, and from where he’ll orchestrate much of his exacting plan, one can’t help but think of the antiheroes in Michael Mann’s crime films.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
Frederik Louis Hviid’s The Quiet Ones is a reminder of the simple pleasures of a caper film with ice in its veins, populated with men whose fortitude predisposes them to pulling off a big job. In the case of this film, the job is a real one that occurred in 2008 amid the global economic collapse, and the 71 million kroner take made it the biggest robbery in the history of Denmark.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Carson Lund |Derek Smith
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, the distance from hope to despair is a short jump—a chasm crossed with the help of something so immediate as a television transmission. As his birthday celebration winds down on a gloomy summer evening in remote Sweden, retired intellectual Alexander (Erland Josephson) tiptoes half-drunk into his living room to find a group of friends and family bewitched by the soft blue glow of a TV set’s screen, out of which emanates an announcement of nuclear conflict.
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2 months ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Derek Smith
“The longer it goes on, the less the world will care about it” says Mstyslav Chernov, director of 2023’s Oscar-winning 20 Days of Mariupol, late in his new documentary, 2000 Meters to Andriivka. His frustration and despair is indicative of the almost nonstop barrage of bullets, grenades, and drone strikes that head his way as he closely follows a small battalion of Ukrainian soldiers while they try to inch their way closer to the town of Andriivka.
