‘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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Rome, Open City review – Rossellini’s blazingly urgent masterpiece from a city in ruins

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Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 neorealist drama is unsparing in its depiction of the heavy price of both resistance and collaboration with the Nazi occupation

Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 film is a blazingly urgent and painful bulletin from the frontline of Italy’s historical agony: the Axis power that had belatedly turned against the Mussolini fascists only to be humiliatingly occupied by Nazi Germany on whose orders the dictator was reinstalled in the northern Salò puppet state, resplendent in contemptible impotence and pathos, with Rome at its defeated and compromised centre. It was a film that used the so-recently-devastated real streets and people of Rome on location for a project on which Rossellini started script work well before the end of the war, building on ideas by screenwriter Sergio Amidei with dialogue contribution by the young Federico Fellini.

Rome, Open City is revived as part of the BFI Southbank’s Chasing the Real season of Italian neorealism, along with the two other movies from his “war” trilogy: the episodic portmanteau film Paisà (1946) and Germany Year Zero (1948). This is the first time I have revisited the film since its rerelease 10 years ago, when the locations seemed as vivid and compelling as the Vienna of Carol Reed’s The Third Man or the (fabricated) Casablanca in Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood classic. Rome was “open” in the sense that that the Allies had agreed not to bomb it in deference to its historic and architectural importance and in return for the Italian authorities’ undertaking not to defend it militarily. In fact, Rome had been bombed before its “open” status was agreed on; one figure asks Anna Magnani’s character here if the Americans really exist, and she shruggingly gestures at the (genuine) bomb damage and says: “Looks like it.”

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