Thrilling Thrillers

On the other hand, it may be too late for American thrillers, but foreign directors—sometimes working in the studio system—seem to be picking up the slack pretty well. Case in point, The Memory of a Killer. I missed it when it played here, but it’s easily the best cop thriller of 2005, a sort of cross between Leon and Heat. It never quite develops the killer-with-Alzheimer’s motif as well as it ought to—his memory loss gets used mainly for a few convenient moments of forgetfulness and some forays into fancy editing—but it’s a top notch assassin/cop movie with slick, moody photography, an intricate mob-and-corruption story, and a dash of killer-cool.

Intelligent genre films like this are what Chris Orr lamented the loss of in his essay on the disappearance of the B+ film, which he defined as, “competent, mid-sized genre films that are formulaic in the good sense.” But between this and the great wave of Eastern genre films—among them Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Infernal Affairs (to which Memory bore strong resemblance)—foreign directors are picking up Hollywood’s genre slack. Terse, plot-driven films with lots of attitude and memorable characters ought to be prevalent at the multiplex as cheesy, starlet-filled rom-coms. Thank God for Netflix.