The plot, moral universe and ending is pure Jean-Pierre Melville and the final shot is pure Johnny To.

Mann clearly watched a ton of French Film Noir and policiers; the dominant theme for twenty years of post-war French crime movies was that cops and crooks come from the same communities, had similar lack of choices and each picked the side of the coin that suited their morals.

Hong Kong cop/crime directors - especially Woo and To - picked up on…

Pure Didion, in all her neurotic-making, oblique, naturalist, heartbreaking astringency. And pure, profound Tuesday Weld, changing the world with the tiniest glimmer of a facial expression.

As always, Didion pares life to its signifiers, with dagger-like sentences people thrust into one another just to see how they'll deep they'll cut. Yet their understated cruelty functions as everyday poetry. And as always, everyone – save the heroine and semi-hero – are so lost in their narcissism they think everyone else yearns…

In the immortal words of my friend Alberto Ferarras (always give credit where it's due): "That film is so aggressively straight straight men can't see how gay it is."

George Stevens wasn’t going to compete with John Ford, so he brought his overheated, horny, golden melodrama to awe-inspiring Jackson Hole.

Gorgeous saturated Technicolor, dynamic camera movement,  brutal graphic fistfights, Jack Palance as a languid, two-gun sex lizard, mega-hella closeups that clearly inspired Leone, and a moving performance from Brandon de…

Expensive television.

Very, very, very expensive television.

Should have been a mini-series and Scorsese shot it like one. Flat, dull frames, closeup after closeup. Eric Roth is way too literal-minded to collaborate with Scorsese.

How many times have you watched MEAN STREETS or RAGING BULL or GOODFELLAS or even CASINO? That crackling energy, the bravura camera, the unpredictability...all go bye-bye.

When did Scorsese give up on visual and narrative metaphor?

PS: Di Caprio is one- note throughout, as is most…