DVD reviews
Waiting For Forever
The film falters, with too many stories to follow all at once...
The Entitled
...twisted and paints a scary picture of modern American youth.
The Orator
...watchable and even enlightening...
The Dead
...impressively original...
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Night & The City (DVD)
Year:
Rating: M
Distributor: Madman
The Film: 3.0
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5
Rain-slicked American streets are the traditional battleground for film noir. But Jules Dassin's Night And The City is set in that very un-noirish metro of London. Thus the action here is played out against the shadows cast from grand houses, and in cobblestone alley ways, and amongst the sleazy ambience of seedy showgirl nightclubs, to which cinematographer Max Greene adds a lot of smoke and fog.
The plot has Richard Widmark\'s squirmy club hustler trying to break into the lucrative promotion caper. He\'s a liar and a cheat, and so when his plan to stage a big wrestling bout goes awry, his history of deceptions and broken promises leaves him with nowhere to hide. It\'s a classic noir set-up; claims to a higher purpose are foiled because a bad debt always follows. That's so much existentialist angst about the way that a desire to reform is negated by "one's true nature". Highly rated by buffs, mostly because of its bizarre settings and characters and brilliant "realist" look, Night And The City comes off as dead-beat and dour rather than the cleansing hammer of cynicism that shatters convenient pieties that the best of the film noir genre has to offer.