Justin Stewart
Time has only been kind to it, and now this most uniquely stylized of the 1980s American war movies is clearly worthy of a top-seeded spot in its category, as well as in its director’s vibrant oeuvre.
Our sellout Saturday night crowd at the midtown Manhattan multiplex couldn't even wait for the screen to go black to erupt into unanimous applause. It was the most thoroughly “taken for a ride” bunch I've ever been a part of.
Everything on Michael Mann's film and television resume predicts the exact Miami Vice that he made, which isn't to say that it's his masterpiece.
The chance of there ever being a true “director's cut” has been precisely nil since the director’s death in 1985, but Criterion has done as much as anyone could have possibly hoped in collating what's out there and presenting it in a hefty three-disc, one-novel set.
Winter Soldier centers on a single meeting on a single day in 1971 when the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War assembled more than 125 soldiers in a Detroit hotel to recount atrocities they’d either committed or witnessed.
The Jackal of Nahueltoro is about six murders. Five of them take place during the film’s most troubling scene, as Jose, the protagonist, beats to death a recently fatherless family who have adopted him into their fold.
Rape/revenge surely must be the most disingenuous of genres. Most can’t avoid at least hinting at titillation during the first half’s assault, while the ensuing revenge pardons the audience for any potentially worrisome jollies and offers them the one-sided righteousness of seeing the baddie justly punished.
The title implies hairy-campy horror-fun and the film delivers it—nothing misleading about that. It’d take a right stickler to quibble over the fact that at no point in the movie do multiple werewolves ride any wheeled vehicle, and that when one of the gang does his ride lasts under a minute.
Just as Jordan “doubled” the number of heists at the climax, so too does he multiply the analytical distance Melville previously placed between his movie’s world and that of the American pulpsters like Asphalt Jungle and They Live by Night he so carefully admired.