Search results for ""Author Demetrios Matheou""

Mean Streets was Martin Scorsese’s third feature film, and the one that confirmed him as a major new talent. On its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1973, the critic Pauline Kael hailed the film as ‘a true original of our period, a triumph of personal film-making’. The tale of combative friends and small-time crooks is set amid the bars, pool halls, tenements and streets of Manhattan’s Little Italy. Scorsese has said of his childhood neighbourhood, ‘its very texture was interwoven with organised crime’, and this quality would dramatically inform the tone and restless energy of his seminal film. Demetrios Matheou’s insightful study considers Mean Streets’ production history in the context of the New Hollywood period of American cinema, noting also the key roles played by John Cassavetes and Roger Corman. He analyses the importance of Scorsese’s background to the film’s characters and themes, including preoccupations with guilt, redemption and criminal subcultures; the development of the director’s film-making process and signature style; the way in which he both drew upon and invigorated the crime genre; his relationship with emerging stars Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, and the film’s reception and legacy. Matheou argues that while Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) are regarded as Scorsese’s greatest films of the period, Mean Streets is the more influential achievement. With it, Scorsese not only paved the way for a new kind of crime movie, not least his own GoodFellas (1990), but also inspired generations of independently-minded film-makers.

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Walter Salles's film The Motorcycle Diaries follows the journey made by the young medical student Che Guevara across Argentina, through Chile, to Peru. At the climax, Guevara exhorts his audience to see beyond their borders and embrace a truly continental identity. This vision lives on today, in the work of a new generation of South American filmmakers. Following the buena onda, the 'good wave' that included the Brazilian favela film City of God, the 2000s saw a renaissance in the continent's cinema, with such diverse Argentine movies as Nine Queens and The Holy Girl, and dazzling new work from Uruguay, Chile and Peru. The new directors have won prizes at major film festivals, been nominated for Oscars, and captured the imagination of audiences worldwide. Many tackle the question of identity amid the ever-changing political and social landscapes of their troubled countries, while developing a network of collaboration and inspiration across the continent. This book featured interviews with the most significant voices of this Latin new wave - people who are 'bonded by blood, politics, strife, courage, ingenuity, and a shared desire and splendid resolve to make movies'.

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