You've all heard this before....*ahem* - Once I had a fortune. It said "leave now, life is short, time is luck."

Anyways, this is like - still the peak of digital photography in movies? NOTHING else looks like this. This is one of the most lyrical, abstract and oblique films to come out of Hollywood. German expressionism gone digital - of course this puzzled many when it first came out, Mann is like a silent filmmaker here - pictures tell us a story before actors do. Moods are denoted by shades of colours in neon. And whole pools, waves of emotions revealed by the near-abstraction in the formations of a cloud.

The last time we see Farrell prior to the…

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Whenever I revisit Miami Vice, my love for cinema is rekindled, ignited like a cool-blue flame. It's so enrapturing, you just want to throw your arms forward and jump head-first into the screen.

Michael Mann is a poet of impressions. In the director's cut, he begins the film with a boat race torn between layers of water and air. Then, a nightclub rooftop illuminated by a magenta sky. And the smear of blood on the asphalt after a suicide on a stretch of highway. These are but a few of Michael Mann's calculated images given a feverish intensity in the first fifteen minutes - a hyper-real display of life on the edge, with the environment as immediate as the…

"Fabricated identity and what's really up collapses into one frame." Literally the best movie ever made.

In which Mann takes this amazing, beautiful thing he helped make/define two decades ago and looks back at it with a sort of matured sense of weariness and despair but also formal rigor that experimentally deglamorizes it. Retaining the doomed romance neon nighttime drive vibes of the original show but updating the specifics from the 1980s cocaine music video era to something closer to Mann's existential character pieces and hyper-researched milieus of professional criminals and their tools/tactics; especially Heat's focus on the obsessive, destructive psychology of men like this and Collateral's foray into urban digital landscape impressionism. Resulting in some technological/geopolitical updates on the…

The change happen at some point midway through Ali, but video certain bring it upfront: the rich detailed oriented world of Mann's 80s and 90s films mutate from the high novelistic accumulation of detail to one in which all that research becomes background, a clutch for world that remains always in the verge of dissolve. What matter in late Mann is just the permanence of the romantic/mythic gesture in the middle of such world. Mann remains the most Hawksian filmmaker of his generation, much more than self professed Hawks disciples like Hill or Carpenter, not because of his emphasis in professionalism as a stick to measure its characters so much as because his world is so heavily stylized: much like…