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La Tete contre les Murs (Head Against the Wall)

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As a subset of the prison movie, the asylum scenario plays with even higher stakes. Remember poor McMurphy at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ? In cinematic terms, institutionalization does more than take away your freedom, it destroys your soul. Consider director Georges Franju’s 1959 La Tete contre les Murs (Head Against the Wall) that turns your average juvenile delinquent into a dispirited husk all to save a father’s reputation and a psychiatrist’s ego. Francois Gerane (Jean-Pierre Mocky) is the son of a wealthy attorney who has never forgiven his father for his mother’s suicide…if it really was suicide. After a family confrontation, Francois is committed to a private mental institution under the care of Dr. Varmont (Pierre Brasseur) whose old-school techniques ensure the patients are kept removed from polite society. Francois’ only hope lies in Dr. Emery (Paul Meurisse), a progressive expert in the field, and Stephanie (Anouk Aimee), a spontaneous love interest wh...
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Aesthetics of a Bullet

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By now North American audiences have more than wetted their appetite for the once obscure yakuza films of Japan. We’ve all seen enough to know what to expect, the historical background that empowered gangsters in post-WW2 black markets and the flexible code of honor that guided their conduct. But what we really haven’t seen is a reaction to the films that made them such endearing anti-heroes in the first place. That’s where Sadao Nakajima’s 1973 Aesthetics of a Bullet comes in. Kiyoshi Koike (Tsunehiko Watase) is a broke, desperate loser when he’s selected by the Tenyu clan to start trouble in Miyazaki, the better to justify an all-out war with a rival clan when he’s killed in retribution. Given a gun and one-million yen, Kiyoshi eagerly plays the part of a “made-man,” but he’s too much of a coward to actually pull the trigger. Instead he enjoys all the benefits of his newfound authority (women, booze, hotel suites) while the Miyazaki clan coddles him until reinforcements arrive. ...
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Solo

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The French New Wave never really produced an answer to the American crime film. Sure, Jean-Luc Godard gave us cool criminals in sunglasses and François Truffaut flirted with noir from time to time, but neither seemed particularly interested in the mechanics of crime itself. In Solo (1970) Jean-Pierre Mocky, isn’t really interested either. He takes a familiar policier framework and infects it with the bitterness, paranoia and political disillusionment that lingered in France after the failed social revolution of May 1968. The result is one of the strangest crime films of the era: part thriller, part political satire and part existential hangover. Vincent Cabral (Mocky), a violinist, womanizer and occasional jewel thief, returns to France only to discover that his younger brother has become involved with a radical revolutionary group responsible for a string of assassinations targeting wealthy members of the bourgeoisie. As police and terrorists close in on one another, Vincent finds hi...
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Marlowe (1969)

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Although he spent years playing PI Jim Rockford on TV’s The Rockford Files , actor James Garner isn’t exactly the first actor that you’d associate with the term “hardboiled.” Raymond Chandler’s famous private detective Phillip Marlowe had already been played definitively by Humphrey Bogart in The Big Slee p (1946) and briefly by Dick Powell in the POV mystery Murder, My Sweet (1944). But Garner fills the shoes quite well in this modernized script that mixes Chandler’s acid-tongued banter with blackmail, hippies and late-‘60s weirdness. The plot of Marlowe is as convoluted as Chandler devotees would expect. Marlowe is hired to track down a missing person, who turns out to be in possession of some naughty negatives that, if released, would ruin the career of a famous TV star. But each clue seems to uncover another corpse, each sporting an ice pick in the back of the neck. And Marlowe’s clients aren’t talking, which begs the question, is he protecting the wrong person? Garner’s easygo...
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Wake in Fright 4K UHD

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“World-building” has been a trendy cinematic term for the last decade. But what director Ted Kotcheff accomplishes in Wake in Fright (1971) is somehow more impressive than the fantastic geography of Middle Earth or the alien jungles of Pandora. He makes a spot right on our own planet look almost completely unrecognizable; not through the use of special effects or elaborate production design, but because every sweat-soaked square inch of Bundanyabba, a fictional backwater mining town in the Australian outback, feels like it belongs to a civilization operating by its own bizarre and unsettling rules. John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young schoolteacher posted at the edge of nowhere, anxious to return to Sydney for his holiday break. But those plans are waylaid when he winds up stranded in “The Yabba” (as locals affectionately call it) after losing his travel money on a gambling binge. John is taken in by an array of local characters who lead him on an alcohol-fueled bender, testing his m...
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Jackie Chan's Breakout Hits!

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What makes Jackie Chan so compelling isn’t how he throws a punch…but how he takes one. Bruce Lee famously refused to lose any of his onscreen battles, projecting a stoic, serious take on martial arts that always kept a straight face. Meanwhile, Jackie is beaten to a pulp in nearly every one of his films, stretching his mug into comedic poses that would make Jim Carrey proud. It’s apples to oranges, but it didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it wasn’t until the early ‘90s that Jackie’s particular brand of action-comedy broke into the American mainstream with Rumble in the Bronx making a big impression during the Sundance midnight screenings. Now Arrow Video has scooped up six of those flicks from his glory days as part of a superb collection called Jackie Chan’s Breakout Hits! Here’s where we’d normally go through the plot of each film, analyze the action sequences, praise the co-stars, fight choreographers and stuntmen. But at this stage of his career, Jackie was a brand unto hims...
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Hi, Mom!

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While collaborations with director Martin Scorsese helped establish Robert De Niro's onscreen persona, his cinematic career began several years before Mean Streets and Taxi Driver ever hit screens. In fact, his early work with director Brian De Palma reveals an actor almost fully-developed from the very beginning, working with the same level of disturbing intensity and charismatic appeal. Simply put: the camera loves him. But in films like Greetings and its sequel, Hi, Mom! , De Palma's camera takes a far more scattershot approach than his later Hitchcock-inspired genre work. Jon Rubin (De Niro), a wannabe filmmaker and full-time voyeur, returns from Vietnam and hooks up with a sleazy producer (Allen Garfield) who sees the pornography potential. However, Jon's life (and the film) takes a drastic shift into radicalization as he falls in with a left-wing theater group promoting the "Black Experience." From this point, De Palma's film becomes a POV politi...
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