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Southpaw (2015)
Solid film, even surprisingly good
Definitely worth watching. The direction and pacing is much better than pretty much anything else I've seen out of Hollywood in the last ten years. Fuqua handles shaky camera work perfectly, without it ever detracting, or worse, becoming annoying (a lot of would-be directors in film school need to watch this and learn). The editing draws you right in -- it's tight and they are working with a ton of shots and angles, it can't have been cheap. Proper film making like you don't see on TV. The performances are, again, much better than standard fare: 8.5 bumped to 9 just because it does not disappoint at all.
I'll Sleep When I'm Dead (2003)
Wickedly compelling and subversive neo-noir
Clive Owen is the master of being quietly, insistently, captivating and this career-closer from virtuoso director Mike Hodges is a sublime and profound inversion of all gangster-film conventions. Gone is the glorification of violence and the slick, improbable dominance of 'hard men,' replaced with authentic, pathetic egotism and weakness. This film may even be a late-life apology for Hodge's younger, less-wizened, and very influential gangster-film work. People who hate it are probably picking up on the complete take-down of their favorite macho fantasies. All the performances are first-class acting but I'm knocking off a star as Charlotte Rampling's character, as written, is short of full realism. Someone else called this film criminally underrated and it is one of those iconoclastic masterpieces not destined to be understood and embraced by the masses.
Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent (2024)
Cerebral Canadian take on the classic formula
This is a well-executed, engaging, entertaining Canadian version of Law & Order CI (the series franchise that focuses on the police investigation and not so much the courtroom). Detective Graff is gruff, experienced, canny, distanced, and perhaps cynical about human relationships. His accent is classic rural Ontario and for foreigners, immigrants and first gen Canadians who've only ever lived in a city, you'd need to visit Sudbury to get it. It is the speech of hockey arenas outside the GTA. Bateman is probably intended to be the urban, less experienced counterpoint (the character went to university in Montreal and is a single mom from a two-ish-night stand). Canadians pride themselves on not being slick, brash, Americans and that contrast definitely comes through. If you need bombast and machismo in your characters you aren't going to like it. The colour-palette is also much less gritty than the NY versions - the old chestnut is that "Toronto is New York run by the Swiss" and there is a consistent cool blue-grey-green-glass tone-International style to the series settings. I bet the Australians will get it and like it.