Portfolio

In what's already been a great year for underappreciated Polish auteurs comes the latest box set from Radiance, The End of Civilization: Three Films by Piotr Szulkin. The three films collected here, all taken from Szulkin's loosely connected 1980s Apocalypse tetralogy, are science fiction at their most grimy and grounded, a distant cry from the fantastical whimsy of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom occurring in contemporaneous America. And while the omission of the first entry in that tetralogy, Szulkin's feature debut Golem (1980), seems odd, this set still marks the best way to see Szulkin's unsettling visions of life under oppressive police state rule.

What is a courtroom if not a staging ground for storytelling? Every aspect of a trial, be it criminal or corporate, hinges on two opposing sides laying claim to a particular version of events, each new witness and piece of evidence placed in a neat order to lead their audience, the jury, to a set conclusion. In the end, the victor will be the side that spins the most convincing yarn, regardless of any overriding “truth” of the matter. But what pushes a juror to ignore the ambiguities such duelling perspectives leave behind and choose one narrative over another? In French director Justine Triet’s latest film, the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall (2023), it’s not only the lawyers that are leading the witness but the formalised aspects of filmmaking craft.

There's a certain irony to be found in reviewing a home release of One False Move, given that the film in question was originally intended for the straight-to-video wastebin. Directed by Carl Franklin in his feature debut, at a time when Franklin was most known for his run as an actor on The A-Team, and premised on the kind of generic culture clash that bargain buckets are weighed down with—two sardonic LA cops get paired with a small town yokel police chief to solve a brutal series of drug-related murders—it's remarkable that it was successful in securing last-minute theatrical distribution. That it's also one of the finer examples of ‘90s neo-noir, lifted by its well-observed character moments and Franklin's deft touch behind the camera, is most remarkable of all.

In many ways, the circuses of the early 20th Century have a similar allure to pre-Code Hollywood cinema; lawless, illicit, and exotic in spite of their appearing on home soil. That sweet spot between the introduction of sound in 1927 and the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934 (a self-imposed rule set that banned profanity, sexual innuendo, and interracial relationships, amongst many other bigoted moral edicts) runs firmly against perceptions of older American cinema as stuffy and tight-lipped.