Two More Films. Good Ones

Roger Ebert the late and great film critic said this of Scorsese's early Mean Streets:

Great films leave their mark not only on their audiences, but on films that follow. In countless ways right down to the detail of modern tv crime shows, "Mean Streets" is one of the source points of modern movies.

The Big Fat Pig (that's me folks - although I have been for a guilty run this morning) is certainly in no position to disagree with Ebert, so he won't. In Mean Streets we see in detail the lives of everyday New York hoodlums, ranging from the misplaced morality of Harvey Keitel's lead to the nihilistic man-child of De Niro's Johnny - the latter a place-holder for Joe Pesci's piece de resistance in Scorsese's later masterpiece Goodfellas. At less than two hours the movie displays a self-discipline from which, dare we suggest it, Tarantino (in the news at the moment for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood) might learn - 8.5/10.

Spotlight has none of Scorsese's cinematographic style but is another important film. Ostensibly one might think it a film about the scandal of sex abuse by catholic priests in Boston, but that is only part of the story. It is also a lament for the lingering death (at the hands of the internet and a twenty-four hour news cycle) of old-fashioned investigative print journalism. An ensemble piece, it is the journalistic procedures it portrays that dominate the piece rather than the stars although we should take particular note of Stanley Tucci's bit part as a principled lawyer. Pointedly unhysterical and never voyeuristic. 8.5/10.