Gangster

Scarface re-released

The greatest of all modern gangster films returns, but why now?

14 Aug 2009

It’s been twenty six long years since Tony Montana (Al Pacino) invited us to ‘say hello to my little friend’ in director Brian De Palma and then screenwriter Oliver Stone’s Reagan era update of Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht’s gangster polemic of the same…

Paris Lockdown

3 Jul 2008

GANGSTER (18) 143min (Momentum DVD retail/rental) This brutally efficient, thoroughly gratuitous French gangster film from Frédéric Schoendorffer, director of Scene de Crime and Spy Bound, explores the lives of various gangsters on the make.

Played

14 Feb 2008

GANGSTER/THRILLER (15) 84min (High Fliers DVD rental) We love, love, love filmmakers who sod the restrictions imposed by low budgets by using every opportunity they can lay their hands on, including mates’ mates who happen to be famous actors. That’s…

Sugarhouse

(15) 90min

23 Aug 2007

Based on Dominic Leyton’s play Collision about a middle class man (Steven Mackintosh) who finds himself forming an unlikely alliance with crackhead D (Ashley Walters) when a volatile gangster Hoodwink (Andy Serkis) comes after him. Hammy, dull and…

Smokin' Aces

20 Dec 2006

With Narc, director Joe Carnahan made a sterling contribution to the cop genre. Noteworthy for its grim bad cop/bad cop partnership the film was completely different to the usual dross. So it’s even more cringing that Smokin’ Aces is such a poor effort…

London to Brighton

27 Nov 2006

‘One year they wanted my ho to be a poster girl... for birth control.’ Jackson Brown, US comedian, pimp. It’s just after 3am in a rundown London toilet and seasoned prostitute Joanne (Georgia Groome) is trying to console a tearful young girl…

Idlewild

(15) 121min

2 Oct 2006

GANGSTER There is a tendency in African American cinema and culture (think Chester Himes novels) to romanticise the 1930s, a world depicted in Harlem Nights, Cotton Comes to Harlem and the first hour of Malcolm X as a time of black gangsters that…