Across 110th Street
A film which—apart from its high-octane bookends in which our broke-and-going-for-it tragic heroes seek flight and freedom by shooting it out in the streets in broad daylight—occurs almost entirely in the back rooms and cramped hallways of harshly- or poorly-lit dens of iniquity, all neon and fluorescent alternately casting their spell or pall on the mottled skins of sweaty and anxious cops and criminals alike. It’s a tense and claustrophobic potboiler that evokes with unsparing yet painterly detail the literal trappings of the grim environment in which our flawed heroes operate, where the best for which one can hope is a compromise. 285