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

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 ...

After 10 years, I'm stepping down as the Observer's film critic. Here are my top films from the decade | Mark Kermode

As I leave the post, I look back on how cinema has changed since 2013 and, below, pick a favourite movie from each year of my tenure – as well as a turkey

This week, I filed my final column as chief film critic for the Observer. I’m stepping down after exactly 10 years in the role, making way for the brilliant Wendy Ide to take over the reins and put her own inimitable stamp on the paper. A longstanding colleague and friend, Wendy is an exceptional critic and I look forward to reading her insightful and elegant reviews in these pages for years to come. In the meantime, looking back at my own experiences over the past decade, I’m struck by how much the moviegoing landscape has changed.

When I took over from the great Philip French in September 2013, Kathryn Bigelow was still the only woman to have won the Oscar for best director, having made history when she triumphed with her tense war drama The Hurt Locker in 2010. The Academy Awards have, of course, always been inherently ridiculous (remember: Citizen Kane didn’t win best picture, but Driving Miss Daisy did). For better or worse, however, this very American shindig tells us something about the way the mainstream film industry views itself. And since the first Oscars ceremony back in 1929, the Academy has overwhelmingly celebrated and prioritised white male film-makers. Yet in the past 10 years, things have at least begun to shift in encouraging ways.

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