“You remind me that money won is twice as sweet as money earned.” Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money (1986) hasn’t the ragged beauty and personal charge of Mean Streets, the ambition or the intensity of Taxi Driver, or the cinematic density of GoodFellas. Yet it is possibly his most accessible film and his answer […]
Provocative and potent, My Beautiful Laundrette (1986) launched a lot of careers while shaking up British cinema in the eighties. Gordon Warnecke stars as Omar, the son of a Pakistani immigrant in London who takes over the management of a failing launderette in a seedy neighborhood owned by his entrepreneurial uncle (Saeed Jaffrey). Omar is […]
“Please baby, please baby, please baby baby baby please!” Spike Lee exploded in the independent film world with his debut feature She’s Gotta Have It (1986), an inventive low budget romance with a strong-willed heroine. Tracy Camilla Johns is the confident and sexually independent Nola Darling, a young professional Brooklynite who is happy to sample […]
Mala Noche (1986), the feature debut of Gus Van Sant adapted from the autobiographical novel by Portland “street poet” Walt Curtis, is an intimate black and white tale of l’amour fou steeped in the culture of Portland, Oregon’s (now long gone) skid row. Walt (Tim Streeter), a counter jockey at a grimy liquor store in […]
