Romeo Is Bleeding

Jack Grimaldi of the New York police sells information to the mob: he hands over the addresses of witnesses in protection and buries what he gets in a hole in his garden. He has a wife, he has a mistress, and he lies to both. Then Mona Demarkov appears: Russian mob, escaped from custody, marked to die. Jack is sent to kill her, and from that point the thing gets away from him. The film takes every shape of noir and inflates it; the story is relayed in Jack's own voice while he keeps trying to justify himself. Mona breaks the femme fatale template: she is never content to seduce, she uses force directly. Peter Medak directed. Gary Oldman plays Jack and Lena Olin plays Mona, with Annabella Sciorra, Juliette Lewis and Roy Scheider in the cast. Olin's performance is what the film is remembered for, and the sequence her character spends in a car boot counts among the strangest in the genre. Who it is for: anyone who likes nineties neo-noir and villains played at the extremes. Who it is not for: anyone wanting restraint. The tone keeps sliding into excess, the violence turns cartoonish, and the women around Jack function in the script as a punishment system.