REVIEW: ‘Gangster Squad’ Invents a New Genre, Film Orange

It isn’t often that I long for Roman Polanski.  Personally, I find him more than a little creepy and twisted.  If I go back to my one unpleasant encounter with him, at the home of a shady financier of his in Paris in the early 90s, I’d say he reminds me of a character lurking in the background of a Harry Potter film.  He is often, however, a great filmmaker.  Chinatown is his co-masterpiece, the definitive L.A. noir film, alongside The Pianist, a definitive Holocaust film.

Chinatown is so good it almost makes you wonder why they keep trying to remake it in one way or the other every decade with way under-benchmark movies like Ruben Fleisher’s Gangster Squad.  But I suppose Sunset Boulevard didn’t stop The Artist from happening, which renders my wondering idiotic.