Director · Screenwriter · 1947

David Mamet

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Homicide

David Mamet · 1991

David Mamet’s 1991 crime drama follows a Jewish homicide detective pulled from a high-profile manhunt into the investigation of an elderly woman’s killing — a case that unravels his assumptions about identity, loyalty, and belonging. With Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, and Ving Rhames, and shot by Roger Deakins, it trades procedural clarity for psychological precision, using police work as scaffolding for a stark, unsentimental study of assimilation, moral drift, and the cost of choosing between competing claims on the self.

13:00

House of Games

David Mamet · 1987

David Mamet’s 1987 directorial debut is a neo-noir thriller about a psychiatrist drawn into a world of confidence tricks. Lindsay Crouse plays Margaret Ford, whose clinical detachment unravels as she learns the grammar of deception from con man Mike Mancuso (Joe Mantegna). Structured like a series of escalating cons, the film traces her shift from observer to participant to perpetrator — culminating not in redemption but in quiet, irreversible moral collapse. Shot with tight framing and sparse scoring, it privileges precision over psychology, logic over catharsis.

13:00

Vanya on 42nd Street

Louis Malle · 1994

Louis Malle’s final film documents Andre Gregory’s long-term workshop on Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, shot in the derelict New Amsterdam Theatre with Wallace Shawn, Julianne Moore, and others. It preserves the rhythms of rehearsal — interruption, repetition, uncertainty — rather than staging a polished performance. Declan Quinn’s restrained cinematography and Joshua Redman’s sparse saxophone score support a film that values duration, silence, and the physical reality of a decaying space over narrative propulsion or dramatic resolution.