Cape Fear (1991)

Because another auteur, Francis Ford Coppola, released his Bram Stoker's Dracula just a year later, I've always had this fanciful notion that Gary Oldman's Count is Scorsese's hideous, half-melted Max Cady, the monstrous-on-a-mythological-scale psychotic rapist, first played in 1962 by Robert Mitchum but immortalised here by Robert de Niro in 1991 and in my mind forever to rise, psychotic eyes first, from the depths of Cape Fear, that terrifyingly named nexus of his revenge plot against Nick Nolte's Sam Bowden, the lawyer who wronged him and whose unfortunate family members, Jessica Lange as Bowden's wife and Juliette Lewis in the performance of her career as the terrified but electrified daughter, Danielle, unfortunate pawns in Cady's game of bloodlust.

★★★★☆

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Hulk (2003)

In his other films, director Ang Lee successfully melds themes and genres in a way atypical of traditional Hollywood - homosexual romance and life on the land in the American Midwest in Brokeback Mountain, major release wuxia in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - but here, his mix of superhero origin story and drama about the uncommunicative men, delivered in comic-book panels and blobby cgi, is less engaging because Lee forgets to give Bruce Banner anything heroic to do beyond overcoming his personal demons, which I suppose is heroic but it ends up feeling like the movie takes two hours to get to a starting point.

★★☆☆☆

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