Benicio del Toro movies

I don't know who wrote the script, but it is, downright, one of the most elaborate, tangy and solidly satisfying original crime scripts I've witnessed in a long while. If there is a tad of a softening toward the end as the plot mechanics grind themselves out, it is a small price to pay for the great pleasures afforded by both the strong tide-pull of the storyline and the juicy dialogue.

dark comedy, yet very nasty scenes...but where is the stone?:))

The world of Sin City is so artificially created, so taken to an unworldly extreme (in noted contrast, it should be added, to the pseudo-neorealism of original film noir) that the gender constructions are almost not offensive, for these are people who were never normal, who were born hard-boiled into a hard-boiled, strictly black and white world and it almost seems wrong to apply the judgments of the real world to one twisted to such excess. Taking its values at its own level one can't help but admire the lengths such ugly, downtrodden men will go to to prove something to their women. But frankly in such a world these women would be far from helpless, and the endless series of slick, immaculately styled, violent male-on-male retributions for the sake of Sin City's many, many women of the night is both too much of one thing and not enough of the other. In small amounts this unbalance can be wicked fun, but pushing past the two hour mark it is too easy to get tired of Sin City's various sins.

The performances in this film are unsentimental and are of immense bravery. Benicio Del Toro's turn as a recovering junkie is the key performance and the entire film seems to have been constructed around his character's personality. He may be down in the gutter but he has a street-wise sensibility about him that is a comfort to those around him. Del Toro's work is immediate and striking, honest and unflinching and steers well clear of any kind of manipulation one could expect from an expressive melodrama. He gives that one of a kind, career defining performance that Halle Berry gave in "Monster's Ball", one that is free from any make-up or contrivance with a delicately paced complexity. Berry too gives an emotionally naked performance that allows her to display the kind of range her recent career moves have denied her.

The story is not particularly dramatic or eventful, mainly because all the drama of the film occurred in the past and we are witnessing the aftermath. It takes a subtle look at the ordinary occurrences in life after a larger than life tragedy strikes. The films asks key questions such as how long do we need to hold onto our memories before they consume us? and how much do we lose when we turn our backs on the past and move forward into an elusive future? and its beauty is in the fact that it never takes short cuts or the easy way out in finding the answers.