“Fuck it, we both die.”

A portrait of a man selling his soul for capital, a fastidious engineer fully devoting himself to his work and craft while further closing himself off from the world and the tragedies hanging over him at every turn. This is a perfect fit in Mann’s oeuvre, not least because Enzo is likely the most that any of Mann’s protagonists have felt like a stand-in for himself. Yet another exceptional work from a master. Loved everything…

Even on rewatch, I still find myself at something of a loss for words to describe exactly why I adore this movie so much. I could start with how the look of this movie is simply like no other, with Mann’s experimentation with digital photography reaching its absolute peak. A humid tropical landscape awash in astounding shades of blue, pink, and orange. Mann’s fuzzy camera captures a hyper-real sense of immediacy, with a wide depth of field and a stark…

Interesting stuff. I went into this hoping it’d be some kind of secret forgotten masterpiece, and it isn’t that, but there’s definitely some solid rewards to be found here. As much as I love Mann, he just isn’t suited very well to the horror genre, and that’s the biggest weakness of The Keep; it’s hardly scary at all. I’m willing to somewhat forgive that given how stylish and atmospheric it is in return—there’s a lot of striking visual ideas (that…

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One of the only two remaining Mann films I had yet to see (The Keep is the other). It’s great. I’m likely not the first to observe this, but Miami Vice, Public Enemies, and Blackhat make for a really interesting three-film run, like a loose trilogy in a way—films where he gets more creative results out of digital photography than any other filmmaker, while exploring various subsets of law enforcement and the larger systems/institutions surrounding them. This is my least…

Despite my love for Mann, I always avoided this since these kinds of historical epics typically end up leaving me cold. But I finally decided to cave, and I shouldn’t have put it off for so long. It’s more commercial than many of Mann’s other films, and something of an outlier in his filmography as a result, but his strengths as a filmmaker prevent this from ever feeling bland or bloated. The action is spectacular, and the imagery is gorgeous…

Still my favorite film of all time. I’ve seen this countless times and I still find new things to love on every single viewing. A film simultaneously grand and intimate in scope, that feels both larger than life and down to earth in its storytelling. Mann fits all kinds of little tangents and side stories into the three-hour runtime, and yet never loses focus of the central cat-and-mouse dynamic. Despite how much ground he covers, none of it feels crammed…