A chilling exploit in the matter-of-fact, this is Shohei Imamura's darkest, most exacting take on the societal loser. What's interesting is that for a serial killer film, the actual act of murder is neither rationalised or assigned routine justification. Formal mechanisms are applied, indicative of a cold distancing imposed through Imamura's treatment, a subject of which is based on fact. Modernism, it seems, has never felt so right, bereft of the show-pony camera tricks, moody under-lighting and sensationalist aesthetics that plague the serial killer movies of today; a genre now wholly desensitised and popularised by psychopaths, satanists, cannibals and insane intellectuals.

DAVID LEVINSON files an appreciation of Federico Fellini's “I Vitelloni”.

FELLINI WASN'T ALWAYS crazy, y'know. Long before he passed that point of no return, spitting out bloated, freeform vaudeville shows, he had a little restraint, managing to anchor the fantastical within the depths of Neo-Realism. La Dolce Vita was the culmination of that sensibility – as its characters suffered the ultimate comedown, gradually careening into their own moral void – but it was the much ignored I Vitelloni that laid the groundwork.

DAVID LEVINSON files an appreciation of Alexander Mackendrick's “Sweet Smell of Success”.

"THE CHARACTERS of Alexander Mackendrick's 1957 Manhattan melodrama look as if they'd melt if exposed to sunlight," remarks Dave Kehr. What's most interesting is the way the film appropriates the mechanics of noir without a single crime taking place. Besides, as they say, once you've been smeared, you're as good as dead. This is a film that wraps itself within the nocturnal folds of a city where information is king, and those who hold it can make or break you.

From the World Cinema Showcase 2004, TIM WONG tackled a pair of topical documentaries: Capturing the Friedmans, where the punishment didn't necessarily match the crime; and Aileen: Life & Death of a Serial Killer, where the crime was the punishment itself.