The Usual Suspects: The Twist That Ate the Film

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Some films are remembered for a performance, some for an image, some for a line. The Usual Suspects (1995) is remembered for a single narrative move so effective that, thirty years on, it is genuinely hard to talk about anything else the film does. The twist ate the film. The question a revisit has to answer is whether there was a good film underneath the trick, or whether the trick was the film all along — and that turns out to be a more interesting problem than it first appears.

Se7en: Fincher's Sermon in the Rain

Tue, 05 Sep 2023 10:00:00 +0000

There is a moment early in Se7en (1995) when Morgan Freeman’s Detective Somerset sits alone in a library after hours while the guards play cards, a metronome ticking beside him, and the film lets Bach’s Air on the G String wash across a montage of illuminated pages. It is the only clean, quiet, well-lit scene in two hours of grime, and David Fincher puts it there deliberately. Everything else in this city runs on rain, sodium light and rot. That library is the one place the film believes in — knowledge, patience, the slow accumulation of understanding — and by the end it will not be enough to save anyone. That is the whole picture in miniature.

Nineties Crime - vo.rs

The Usual Suspects: The Twist That Ate the Film

Se7en: Fincher's Sermon in the Rain