Documentary

Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul – Uniting Modernity and Tradition in Turkish Music

MUHAMMED NOUSHAD reviews Fatih Akin’s documentary Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul.  Turkish music is irresistibly intoxicating. The more you listen to it, the more it binds you inside. Once you begin to indulge in its soothing pleasure, it engages you to endless entrapment. Here, modernity cohabits with tradition as in the historic city…

Link

Crime

Movie Review: Purple Noon

This is the first post in The Cinematic Mr. Ripley, a series for the MovieThoughts category of my blog that considers moral themes in Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels and the film adaptations of those books. This post looks at Purple Noon, the 1960 French adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Alain Delon. It…

Link

Crime

Le Cercle Rouge

Gliding almost without speech down the dawn streets of a wet Paris winter, these men in trench coats and fedoras perform a ballet of crime, hoping to win and fearing to die. Some are cops and some are robbers. To smoke for them is as natural as breathing. They use guns, lies, clout, greed and nerve with the skill of a magician who no longer even thinks about the cards. They share a code of honor which is not about what side of the law they are on, but about how a man must behave to win the respect of those few others who understand the code.

Link