Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg, 2007

Cronenberg's underworld saga, which plays like a fierce, unrepentant conflation of the Dardennes' L'Enfant and Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, suffers slightly from a lack of narrative focus, but nonetheless masterfully maintains a mood of palpable, grimey menace throughout.

Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino, 2007

Rather than engaging in gross, unrelenting shock/violence, Tarantino instead constructs his supposed genre exercise (recently released to DVD in an extended cut) around protracted scenes of dialogue both infectiously witty and effortlessly cool (as is his stock and trade), punctuating each extended exchange with pitch perfect thrusts of popcorn violence.

The Brave One, Neil Jordan, 2007.

Jordan's fever dream tale of revenge treads in dark, icy, and downright strange psychological waters. Much like Jane Campion's similarly hallucinatory In The Cut, Jordan first acknowledges, then subverts, Hollywood cobs-and-robbers conventionality, leaving a fractured, disjointed film light on procedure but rich with moral ambiguity.

Les Doulos, Jean Pierre Melville, 1962

Melville, following the model of like-minded helmers Jacques Becker, Jules Dassin, and Julien Duvivier, crafts, with Le Doulos (recently re-released theatrically), a solid policier from amongst the cloak and dagger underground of mid-century France. Euro giants Belmondo and Piccoli are in top form, as are Melville's striking, elegant compositions.

The Outsider, Nicholas Jarecki, 2005

Jarecki's endearing (if somewhat commonplace) portrait of director James Toback offers a number of entertaining antecdotes (Toback lived with Jim Brown in the 70s?!), alongside some valuable insight into Toback's singular process. Dissapointingly, though, Jarecki and his cast of hagiographers (rangeing from Robert Towne to Brett Ratner) only tacitly confront the demons that have long plagued and inspired the mercurial director.