THE FUNERAL (72)

Directed by: Abel Ferrara

Starring: Christopher Walken, Chris Penn, Vincent Gallo, Annabella Sciorra

The Pitch: A pair of 30s Mafiosi are conflicted over how best to avenge themselves for their brother's murder.

Theo Sez: Give Ferrara a period setting, a family of Italian gangsters and a lot of talk about labour relations and you still end up with a long-night-of-the-soul movie - albeit as powerful and haunting as any he's made. It's a film of extremes - affectless, cadaverous Walken against mountainous, explosive Penn (even if his high-pitched yelling does occasionally sound like Lou Costello), the stark spotlit visuals against the rambling, shaggy-dog plotting, the characters' passion and love of family against their ice-cold undercurrent of desperate machismo. It's also, I suppose, about the Mob's (and perhaps America's) self-destruction from flawed family values to (even) worse corporate ones, the loss of a certain common-man purity - but these are incidentals ; it's primarily a chamber-drama for tortured hoodlums, Bergman's take on the Corleones or perhaps a profane Arthur Miller illuminated by flashes of lightning. It's a great screech of pain, despair and Catholic guilt : one-note perhaps, but impossible to ignore.