Movies to See Right Now

Photo caption: Ralph Fiennes (front) in CONCLAVE. Courtesy of Focus Features.

This week on The Movie Gourmet, new reviews of Edward Berger’s Vatican thriller Conclave, the first of this fall’s big Hollywood prestige pictures, and Hong Sang-soo’s little meditation In Water.

Note: In the Summers, director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s hihly recommended debut film, is now available to stream on Amazon.

REMEMBRANCE

Quincy Jones, one of the giants of American music, left a huge imprint on American cinema, with contributions to literally hundreds of films. Starting with The Pawnbroker in 1965, he composed scores of soundtracks and earned seven Oscar nominations for original score or original song.

CURRENT MOVIES

ON TV

Harvey Keitel (left) and Robert De Niro (center) in MEAN STREETS.

On November 12, Turner Classic Movies is airing Mean Streets, the explosive showcase for Marin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro. In 1973, the three were essentially unknown, although De Niro had gained some notice as the slow-wited and dying catcher in the weeper Bang the Drum Slowly earlier in the year. Keitel’s first credit was in Scorsese’s debut film Who’s That Knocking at My Door?. De Niro’s next two films were The Godfather Part II and Taxi Driver. In the next five years, Keitel would make three more Scorsese films and work with Paul Schrader, Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola. Scorsese followed Mean Streets with the popular and affecting drama Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and then embarked on his historic run of masterpieces (Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, Goodfellas) and some of recent cinema’s most ambitious films: The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York, and Killers of the Flower Moon).

In Mean Streets, Keitel plays a low-level gangster ridden with Catholic guilt and worried about his wild and self-destructive friend (played by De Niro), who seems destined to piss off one too many loan sharks. Scorsese’s introduction to these vivid characters and the verisimilitude with his setting in Little Italy demonstrated his filmmaking promise.