BOOKS
★★★★ ☆ JEAN-BAPTISTE THORET WHITE LION PUBLISHING
One of Hollywood’s premier stylists, Michael Mann’s obsessively authentic features and epoch-making 80s TV series Miami Vice provide a rich bran tub of themes for film critic Thoret to theorise lavishly about: existential heroes, late-stage capitalism, why DoP Dante Spinotti made Manhunter (1986) so damn blue…
Cleaving to the director’s arc closely, from his 70s Starsky & Hutch scripts to 2023 biopic Ferrari, this dense, verbose book delights in tracking the Mann hero’s macho individualism, from Thief (1981) through to crime classic Heat (1995), the outlaw-loving Public Enemies (2009) and cyber-thriller Blackhat (2015). Thoret devotes much space to unpacking the postmodern philosophical ideas that underlie Mann’s shiny, abstract cityscapes, as well as his debt to European film auteurs such as Antonioni and Jean-Pierre Melville.
It’s an unabashedly thinky book, one that enjoys dissecting the swooning romance of The Last of the Mohicans (1992) as much as the fierce intelligence of The Insider (1999). Oddly, considering Mann’s aesthetic reputation, its many film stills are on the small size, and there are no detailed shot breakdowns. But Thoret’s detailed readings of everything from cult horror flop The Keep (1983) to resistance-figure study Ali (2001) will be manna to the Mann fans.
