Revenge - vo.rs

Oldboy: The Corridor, the Twist, and Park Chan-wook's Rage

Tue, 21 Oct 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Oldboy has been reduced, over twenty years, to three things: a man eating a live octopus, a fight down a corridor filmed in one long sideways take, and a twist so vicious that people who have never seen the film know to be careful discussing it. That reduction does the film a disservice, because underneath the shocks Park Chan-wook made a genuine tragedy — a revenge story so total that it swallows the avenger, the target, and the audience’s own appetite for revenge along with them. Revisited now, with the initial jolt long spent, it plays less like a provocation and more like a Greek drama with the lights turned all the way up.

Mandy: Cosmatos, Cage, and Grief Rendered in Lava Light

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Mandy is the film that convinced a lot of people Nicolas Cage was serious again, though anyone who had been paying attention knew he had never stopped being interesting. What Panos Cosmatos’s second feature actually did was find the exact frame that Cage’s late style demands: a slow, hallucinatory, lava-lit revenge tragedy where a man’s grief is so large it has to be rendered in colour and distortion because no naturalistic performance could contain it. Released in 2018, eight years after Cosmatos’s glacial debut, it arrived looking like a heavy-metal album sleeve someone had learned to animate, and it turned out to have a broken heart at the centre.

Get Carter (1971): Caine, Concrete, and No Redemption

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Michael Caine spent the 1960s playing charmers — the cheeky spy, the cockney lothario, the working-class boy with a twinkle. In 1971 he walked into Get Carter and turned all of that inside out. Jack Carter is charm weaponised: the same smooth voice, the same crisp suit, aimed now at hurting people. It is the best performance of Caine’s career, and it anchors what has a strong claim to be the coldest, hardest crime film Britain has ever produced.