In a summer where one can choose to watch on the big screen a great epic about the physical, psychological, and moral tragedy of war (in the form of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey) or to watch on the small screen some of the stupidest, cruelest discourse justifying military conflict (accompanying the escalating clusterfuck in the Middle East), Gotham Calling looks back at a time when the heroism, exhilaration, desperation, and even dehumanization of combat used to fill many of the covers on comic-book stands:
For the most part, I had a nice time watching the latest Supergirl movie, although it’s hard not to feel a bit frustrated about all the squandered potential. Milly Alcock crafts such a fun, yet nuanced, character that it would be great to see her work with a more daring script, like last year’s bonkers Superman. It doesn’t help that, in adapting 2021’s witty mini-series Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the film keeps discarding the comic’s most memorable lines, ideas, and set pieces, to be replaced with more generic, dumbed down versions. Crucially, instead of drawing inspiration from Bilquis Evely’s and Matheus Lopes’ gorgeous visuals, director Craig Gillespie drenches almost everything in murky darkness, so that it’s often hard to see what is going on, which makes the action scenes even more non-specific (and sometimes downright unclear).
That said, there is certainly a place in my heart for stories that don’t try to break the mold. In fact, having recently watched the British shows The Capture and Steal, I got in the mood for another post about cool thrillers, specifically this particular pitch of mid-level genre fare that settles for just doing what they do really fucking well. And since I know at least some of you are bound to gravitate towards this blog in search of less conventional picks, here are a handful of pictures that that may have slipped under the radar because, formally, they aren’t especially ambitious… but which can nevertheless be highly satisfying if you’re in the right mood.
DEAD OF WINTER (2025)
Emma Thompson plays a widow fisherwoman who stumbles into a kidnapping and spends the rest of the film in a cat-and-mouse game among the Minnesota snow. I love this sort of stuff, with an aggressive landscape lifting up – and imbuing with depth – what could’ve been a simple story (much like the recent crime comic The Voice Said Kill did with the Louisiana bayou). There are obvious echoes of Fargo, not just in the stark contrast between the niceness of average Midwesterners and the nastiness they encounter (which was depressingly prescient of early 2026), but also in the way Christopher Ross’ cinematography powerfully captures and uses the cold setting. You really feel the pain and discomfort every time someone has to expose part of their body to the open air, not least because these are not conventional action heroes and villains, making Dead of Winter a brutally intense thriller on a sensorial level. Unlike Fargo, however, this is set in a lawless land, in what seems like the middle of nowhere, so – to quote another classic – nobody can hear you scream.
IN THE SHADOWS (2010)
The driest of dry heist films, this German thriller beautifully tests how much you can love the genre without adornments. There is no music, no visual expressionism, no histrionics. Its Berlin isn’t a hellscape, but rather a bright modern city where people go about their lives unaware of the crime underworld operating in the titular shadows. What you do get is a neat, nicely told neo-noir plot about professional robbers with their own codes, closely reminiscent of Richard Stark’s Parker series. While the pacing of In the Shadows makes Vince Gilligan feel like Guy Ritchie, I was glued to the screen every single minute of it. And the sequel, Scorched Earth, is even better!
RELAY (2024)
Relay starts where most other thrillers end, with a whistleblower bargaining for his life by telling a powerful businessman he has copies of important documents that will be automatically leaked to the press if harm happens to him. Our protagonist, Ash, is the guy who will check up on him, keep, and, if necessary, leak the documents. In fact, Ash is a fixer specialized in mediating this type of situation. He’s also a paranoid professional who has figured out how to ingeniously use the services of modern society to stay off the radar in the surveillance age, so the film evokes both the existential loneliness of 1974’s The Conversation and the three-steps-ahead fantasies of the Jason Bourne series (there are also echoes, deliberate or not, of Soi Cheang’s underrated gem Accident). Ash’s background and the moral implications of his trade bring in some thematic heft to the proceedings, but the main draw are the cleverly constructed, tightly edited hide-and-seek games he has to play when he finally meets his match in the form of a sinister team of subcontractors, especially when he uses the anonymity that the chaos of New York streets can provide.
JUDOKA-SECRET AGENT (1967)
To judge by 1960s’ cinema, spies and judo must’ve seemed like the coolest things in the world back then, so I can just see where the idea of a French secret agent who is also a judo black belt came from. To be fair, by then western pop culture had already begun to develop a rich, fascinating relationship with martial arts, yet it may still have sounded original at the time to so prominently highlight the protagonist’s defensive fighting skills (including a nifty sequence where the camera shifts just enough for you to appreciate the choreography in the form of shadow silhouettes). In any case, I’ve quite a soft spot for the kind of B-movie that develops its own style, somehow conjuring up a mood where low budget or choppy storytelling become part of the charm rather than an obstacle. Judoka-Secret Agent walks that fine line where I’m sure many will simply consider its minimalism boring and inept while others (like me) enjoy it as a spellbinding experience, letting themselves go along for the ride (the vague plot only becomes a bit clearer near the end) as this guy meanders through Paris, pursuing and being pursued for long stretches at Orly Airport, and finally getting into a boat chase on the Seine, most of it at the beat of a groovy soundtrack. Although it’s a French-Italian Eurospy, the production wisely doesn’t try to imitate the kooky flashiness of 007, instead going for a more grounded vibe, which makes it even more thrilling whenever one of those elements (like a trapdoor or a hidden weapon) suddenly shows up. That said, like in most Eurospy flicks, there is a scene set in a striptease show, although this strip act is particularly bizarre (it involves a snowman), not least because of the general deadpan tone. Plus, in the midst of all the tense, dour proceedings, there is a scene where an agent goes undercover as a protest singer with a horrible hippie wig, which is nothing short of hilarious (deliberately, I’m sure).
THE MECHANIC (2011)
Back here in the 21st century, we have this surprisingly smooth remake of 1972’s super-assassin yarn The Mechanic, with a stoic Jason Statham in Charles Bronson’s role (and, thus, arguably the closest you’ll get to seeing Statham as an alternate Batman). The posters were so uninspired compared to the original movie that I feared the worst, but fortunately this version acquits itself well in terms of recognizing much of what made the source material so awesome in the first place. Notably, it also opens with an extended wordless sequence and, in fact, it faithfully follows the original’s plot beats – until the moment it doesn’t – while slickly reimagining the specifics. As far as lean, stone-cold hitmen films go, this may not reach the heights of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï or even of a cult piece like Francesco Prosperi’s The Hired Killer, but it’s still a damn fine watch.
SUMMERTIME KILLER (1972)
Finally, something messier and more tonally inconsistent… which is exactly what makes it stick. Summertime Killer is basically a modern-day western about a laconic, revenge-driven killer, except that he rides a motorcycle rather than a horse (although there are some horses around, as well). Besides the adrenaline-pumping action scenes, I’m guessing what made this such an exploitation favorite among the likes of Tarantino is how eerily dissonant the whole thing is. The protagonist looks like a sweet angel but does the most awful things. Cheesy light music and romcom montages conjure up the guise of a love story but, when you think about it, the romance is disturbingly perverse. I suppose the ending could be read as youth moving on from their parents’ shadow, in line with the era’s counterculture and generation gap, but the resolution is way more twisted than hopeful. If there is a ‘70s vibe about the film, it comes from its grittiness… and its unabashed passion for car chases!
As longtime readers of Gotham Calling know, I’m a massive fan of 1950s’ EC Comics. More than delivering a bunch of brilliant stories in the specific realms of science fiction, crime, horror, and war, the publisher developed an influential overall style – a peculiar darkly ironic spirit that was later best brought to the big screen by Sam Raimi in Drag Me to Hell and Send Help (or even in his more restrained A Simple Plan), not to mention, more recently, Curry Barker’s Obsession.
With that in mind, today, let’s celebrate EC’s daring genre versatility:
For some reason, in 2004 Joel and Ethan Coen decided to remake 1955’s classic black comedy The Ladykillers, about thieves preparing a London heist by posing as musicians practicing in the cellar of a naive old lady who inadvertently fucks up their plans. The original – like other productions coming out from Ealing Studios at the time – delightfully mined humor from the contrast between British quaintness and the macabre goings-on, whereas the Coen brothers relocated the action to Mississippi and turned every character into a grotesque exaggeration of broad – and mostly stale – stereotypes. I wouldn’t mind them blowing up the tone into sheer cartooniness (which worked just fine in Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy), except that the result was not only the brothers’ weakest film, but also the least funny, earning less laughs than any of their supposedly serious thrillers and dramas. Still, I guess it’s not entirely without redeeming features… Tom Hanks is a blast as a sinister and verbose classics professor struggling to disguise his mischievous nature, especially through a devilish snicker. Cinematographer Roger Deakins keeps things aesthetically pleasing on the screen and the pacing is nice, benefitting from the gospel soundtrack. The latter ties into recurrent allusions to segregation and to Christian faith, vague themes that I don’t think coalesce into much more than mocking the beliefs of the old lady (here played by Irma P. Hall). Thematically, I got more of a kick out of the various references to Edgar Allan Poe, whose gothic narratives of ghastly ironies can be seen as a distant relative of this type of story, even if here the whole thing is rendered as an outright farce.
I’m not going to recommend the original The Ladykillers, even though I really like it, because that picture’s subtle tone is so far off from the Coen brothers’ remake that you are unlikely to enjoy them both. However, the Ealing production was only one of a bunch of entertaining capers to come out at the time, in the mid-to-late 1950s. For my money, the most hilarious of the lot is Mario Monicelli’s Big Deal on Madonna Street, about small-time criminals in Rome who come across what seems to be a great plan to rob a pawnshop’s safe, yet they have to face constant setbacks, mostly brought about by their own human flaws. With a nice pace and enough sight gags to appeal to any Coen fan (those Donald Duck aprons…), this comedy adds a cast of characters that are quirky but also recognizable people rather than mere caricatures, which actually makes them funnier (a scene at a wake is a wonderful piece of filmmaking, simultaneously touching and amusing). I guess Big Deal on Madonna Street is the kind of film I wish The Ladykillers had been, effectively weaving in social commentary between (or, rather, through) the laughs, in this case by offering a tour of a certain underworld of petty thieves and scammers, where everyone seems to know everyone and they are constantly in and out of prison while dreaming of a big score that will lift them out of poverty, thus exposing a hard reality underneath the lighthearted camaraderie.
If what you find most attractive in the Coens’ movie is precisely the overblown characters, however, you may prefer Wake Up Dead Man, the latest installment in Rian Johnson’s series of cartoony whodunits featuring master detective Benoit Blanc (a Daniel Craig whose drawl and speech pattern sound like a parody of Tom Hanks’). Like most Hercule Poirot stories, those films can be viewed out of order and, like The Ladykillers, they make the most out of their ensemble cast of stars while drawing humor from both visuals and witty dialogue. Wake Up Dead Man would be my pick, because it also contains a strong religious dimension (here we get a locked-room mystery in a Catholic church), although I’d argue this one is a much more accomplished work than the Coens’ extravaganza in the in the way it ties genre to matters of faith, without falling into either sentimentalism or pure cynicism… And, as usual, while the comedy helps with the suspension of disbelief, the plot is pretty clever, including a set of metafictional clues (or red herrings?) when Blanc finds a list of novels from which the murderer probably drew inspiration, thus teasing those of us who know the resolution to those tales.
In a way, 4 Kids Walk into a Bank works almost as an inversion of The Ladykillers, with a young girl deliberately trying to sabotage a heist, again with violent consequences. Yet Matthew Rosenberg’s script for this comic is more caustic and full of surprises, nailing the way kids can’t seem to stay focused on anything for long and the charming fun of a precocious girl messing up adults’ plans (almost a decade later, he has revisited this premise in We’re Taking Everyone Down With Us). Likewise, the art of Tyler Boss – excellently flattened by Clare DeZutti and lettered by Thomas Mauer – is even more inventive than Deakin’s cinematography, using layouts and angles to add further layers of comedy. Not that I think the creators had The Ladykillers in mind when putting together this riotous mini-series: there are nods to all sorts of crime movies in the variant covers, in scattered Easter Eggs (Sidney Lumet High School, Tardi Avenue, etc), and in the chapter titles, which twist classic quotes into the kid motif (‘As far back as lunchtime I always wanted to be a Gangster.’). Apparently, there is a screen adaptation coming out soon and I hope it does with film language the magic that Tyler Boss did with comic book design (perhaps it can also polish the ending, since Rosenberg doesn’t quite stick the landing in terms of tonal shift). Regardless, if you’re into darkly humorous capers, don’t miss this cool book!
