Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a private investigator with a permanent glaze of marijuana and melancholy, opens the door to a ghost—Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), barefoot, brown-skinned, backlit like a memory. She’s his former lover, and she arrives bearing a story soaked in paranoia: her current boyfriend, real estate tycoon Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), may be the target of a plot involving his wife, her sidepiece guru, and the baroque inner workings of Los Angeles capital.

Ryan Gosling’s Lost River is less a film than a haunted tableau — the half-submerged memory of a forgotten VHS found in a house that should have been condemned: frayed, half-erased, pulsing with beauty and dread.

The Insider is evidence that Mann’s cinema is marked by a formal and cultural ‘tense’ linked to his historical heritage. In the watershed article ‘La politique des auteurs’, Bazin writes: “Jacques Rivette has said that an auteur speaks in the first person. It’s a good definition; let’s adopt it.”[iii] Mann’s film language speaks in the ‘past tense’ about Mann’s biography.

“Guns Akimbo” is now irrevocably the film that’s both about and embroiled in a painful online saga with offline consequences.

I can't fathom a world that "The Beach Bum" exists where it wasn't some instant cult classic.