Directed by Martin Scorsese • 1991 • United States
Starring Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange
Martin Scorsese fuses his bravura stylistic command and personal themes of sin and guilt with the pulp-pleasure mechanics of genre filmmaking for this brutally effective thriller, a morally unsettling, grippingly virtuosic remake of the 1962 Robert Mitchum–Gregory Peck (both back in cameo appearances) classic. Here, a terrifying Robert De Niro brings psychopathic swagger to the role of Max Cady, a tattoo-scrawled rapist who, just released from prison, makes it his mission to exact revenge on Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), the public defender who lost his case, waging a personal, increasingly berserk campaign of retribution that ensnares Bowden’s wife (Jessica Lange) and impressionable teenage daughter (Juliette Lewis).
Up Next in Southern Gothic
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Cape Fear
Directed by J. Lee Thompson • 1962 • United States
Starring Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Polly BergenScreen legends Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum face off in this terrifying tale of revenge built around one of the screen’s all-time great villains. Mitchum is mesmerizingly menacing as Max Cad...
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Eve’s Bayou
Directed by Kasi Lemmons • 1997 • United States
Starring Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Samuel L. Jackson“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” So begins Kasi Lemmons’s spellbinding feature debut, an evocative journey into the maze of memory steeped in fragrant southern-gothi...
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The Night of the Hunter
Directed by Charles Laughton • 1955 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian GishTHE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, i...
