The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 23-29
Hard Target (1993)
Directed by John Woo
New Orleans meets the craftsmanship of the Shaw Brothers in Hard Target, a kinetic action flick of choreographic refinement. When Natasha (Yancy Butler) comes to town to investigate the death of her estranged homeless father, she accidentally uncovers a sadistic business where bored rich people hunt down and kill the destitute. But as Chance Boudreaux (Jean-Claude Van Damme) explains to the villain who runs this classist human safari, “poor people get bored too.” Roles are then reversed as magnificent sequences of immaculate violence are shot and edited with elegant and morally justified grace. Woo definitely has an eye for detail, but also one for the ethnographic diversity of New Orleans, whose social and cultural nuances are not flattened out in the pursuit of action which nonetheless remains the poetic core of the film. Giovanni Vimercati (November 28, 9:30pm at the Alamo Drafthouse)