Drawing from his one-act comedy play “Death,” Woody Allen expanded his Franz Kafka riff into an overt homage to German Expressionism, that moody film style characterized by shadowy B&W cinematography where daylight is barely seen,..
Sean Penn headlines a pair of modern noir entries on Blu: Oliver Stone’s brilliantly wacky U-Turn (1997) from Twilight Time, and Pierre Morel’s The Gunman (2015) from Universal.
A gamble for Mike Medavoy’s fledgling Phoenix Films and ultimately a box office and critical dud upon its theatrical release, U-Turn’s evolved into an undiscovered classic of modern noir if not a cult film, and one of Oliver Stone’s best films of the 1990s where every instinct almost yields a perfect result…
One could present a fair argument that this film version of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s novel The Prone Gunman is a film noir veiled in a series of extended action montages, mostly because its leading character, a sniper named Terrier is a ‘dogged’ figure whose past comes to bite him in the ass, and mandates fast action and revenge…
Reviews of two films chronicling aspects of the Vietnam War and its central refugee characters: Oliver Stone’s Heaven & Earth (1993) on Blu via Twilight Time + Timothy and Tony Bui’s Green Dragon (2001) on DVD from Sony.
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