‘People who commit heinous crimes can be victims’: Michael Mann on the provocative power of Manhunter at 40

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As a stunning 4K restoration arrives in theaters, the director and cast reflect on creating the disturbing descent into a criminal underworld Michael Mann has shown time and again in films like Thief , Heat , Miami Vice and Public Enemies that he is one of American film’s greatest explorers of the underworld. “It’s like a kind of cultural anthropology,” Mann tells me from his office in Los Angeles. “If you make films, you get to do that in a different place with a different subject every few years. For me, the exploration is the high.” With its unsettling atmosphere and soaring beauty, Mann’s 1986 film Manhunter reimagined how a thriller could look, sound and feel in an early high point for the director. To commemorate its 40th anniversary Manhunter: The Final Cut , a 4K restoration and director’s cut with three minutes of new footage, will see a theatrical release in New York and Los Angeles this weekend with a nationwide US rollout to follow. Continue reading... from Film | The ...
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The Black Demon review daft but fun giant-shark mayhem on Mexican oil rig

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Sincere performances and lively banter turn hokey into entertaining as Josh Lucas’s engineer and his family do battle with a megalodon

It would seem that megalodons are the menace of the moment. These ginormous sharks, thought to be extinct for millions of years, have been retro-spawned for entertainment purposes by the audiovisual-industrial complex – specifically in the Meg franchise but also on the Discovery Channel – because great white sharks, veterans of the Jaws movies, just don’t cut it any more. Still, in thematic terms there’s a throughline that connects most shark movies: one way or another, they’re all about the return of the repressed, with the sharks manifesting the oceanic subconsciousness’ raging, violent id that has been enraged by the human superego effort at mastery over nature. In the original Jaws, it’s not so much Bruce the shark that’s the big bad as it is the township’s greedy mayor, determined to declare the beach safe in the interests of capitalism.

Directed by American Adrian Grunberg, its screenplay written by Boise Esquerra working from a screenplay by Carlos Cisco, The Black Demon effectively sticks to this well-greased formula. Yes, there’s a ginormous shark pootling around the waters along the coast of Mexico, locally known as “el demonio negro”. But the real, nefarious behemoth of the deep is a leaky oil-drilling platform offshore that was installed by a fictional conglomerate known as Nixon Oil, the name itself redolent of right-wing gringo corruption. (Which is ironic because Richard Nixon, for all his sins, was the president who started the Environmental Protection Agency.) Paul (Josh Lucas) is an engineer who works for Nixon, and as the film starts he arrives in the town nearest to the rig he supervised building years ago, with his wife, Ines, (Fernanda Urrejola) and two kids, Audrey (Venus Ariel) and Tommy (Carlos Solórzano) in tow for a family vacation while he inspects the rig.

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