In Gun Crazy (1950) death, love and madness go in high gear, and it's hard to keep track midst all the shooting. At a traveling show the boy meets his soul mate, a gun-carrying, wild-blooded and death-foolish blonde. It’s love at first shooting.

Crossfire (1947) begins with a brutal murder. We only see the shadows of one man beating another to death in a hotel room. In due course we discover that a fascist has killed a Jewish man. Nothing new under the sun? Perhaps, but there’s a problem: we're in Washington D.C. two years after the military defeat of fascism. And that's the catch: military defeat of fascism does not mean its demise.

Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986) is not conventional cinema. It is enigmatic, dazzling, and disturbingly lyrical. And yet successful.

A time for idiots.

Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) play, as reporters, the good-cop-bad-cop routine. Hoffman steals the show with an anxious, restless performance. A normal person wouldn’t allow him to enter the house, but would unleash the dogs.

Silence is structurally loose, and too long. Scorsese has taken a liking for three-hour films, but, with some rare exceptions (say, David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia), longer films do not make for better ones (Spike Lee’s Malcolm X…). This is a work of courage, though, and it risks everything on a few scenes.