Cape Fear

I just watched the 1991 Cape Fear. I always thought it was a particularly effective and scary movie, especially given DeNiro's fearless performance as Max Cady. What I didn't appreciate until now (despite watching it on AMC where I had to put up with commercials and dubbed cuss words) was the strength of the production. In particular, the editing and cinematography are stunning. The tone of the movie is set with the shots in this case. It is so hard to make a film edgy with just camerawork the way this does. It has a noire sensibility and yet still seems contemporary with its time. Seriously amazing camerawork - those shots set the nervous pace of the film. I still don't like a lot of the actors. Juliette Lewis is probably my least favorite female actor and I don't like Nick Nolte or Jessica Lange. Still, here they work partly because their acting styles are as they are. Scorsese seems to have used their inherent and indescribable unpleasantness as a feature here.