Actor · 1935–2018

Frank Adonis

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

On film.briefs3

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Jim Jarmusch · 1999

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) follows a Black hitman in New Jersey who lives by the samurai code of Hagakure while working for an Italian-American crime family. Directed by Jim Jarmusch and scored by RZA, it unfolds with deliberate stillness, using Robby Müller’s restrained cinematography and Forest Whitaker’s physically precise performance to sustain a world where ritual, silence, and cross-cultural synthesis are structural facts, not themes to be explained.

13:00

Bad Lieutenant

Abel Ferrara · 1992

Abel Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant follows a New York police officer over a single day of spiralling addiction, abuse of power, and spiritual erosion. With Harvey Keitel in a physically uncompromising performance, the film rejects redemption arcs and procedural logic in favour of sustained, unsparing immersion in ethical collapse. Shot on gritty 16mm by Ken Kelsch and scored sparsely by Joe Delia, it treats Catholic iconography and police authority as hollowed-out symbols. Not a thriller, but a forensic study of vacancy wearing a badge.

13:00

Raging Bull

Martin Scorsese · 1980

Martin Scorsese's 1980 film adapts former middleweight champion Jake LaMotta's own memoir into a study of a man whose jealousy and temper wreck his marriage and his relationship with his brother and manager Joey at the same rate his boxing career rises and falls. Shot in black and white, partly because research showed period boxing gloves came in too narrow a range of colours to justify colour film, and built around a physical transformation in which Robert De Niro gained roughly 60 pounds to play LaMotta's later years, the film returned only a modest $23.4 million against its $18 million budget on release but later won Oscars for De Niro's performance and Thelma Schoonmaker's editing.