Watch List Weekly Recap 5/27/22

Some weeks, it's tough to write. This was one of them.

Watch List Weekly Recap 5/27/22

This is the Friday recap of Ty Burr’s Watch List postings for the week. If you’d like to receive this weekly email ONLY, please go to your account page and under “Email notifications” uncheck every box except “Weekly Digest.” If you’d prefer to not receive it at all, uncheck just “Weekly Digest.”


On Tuesday, I climbed into the Wayback Machine for a visit to the Boston crime-movie classic that sowed the ground for a genre to come. “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” is grim, essential viewing, and essential Boston, too, thanks to a script that pretty much photocopies the George V. Higgins novel on which it was based. That’s Robert Mitchum above, and never has this lion of film noir seemed so defeated and so moving.

Flashback: "The Friends of Eddie Coyle"
I had the dark pleasure this weekend of rewatching “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973, streaming on Kanopy and for rent on Amazon, Apple TV, and elsewhere, **** stars out of ****). It’s the very first Boston crime movie and, in the opinion of many, myself included, still the best. I’m leading

Something awful happened Tuesday, and, like you, I spent the following day in a haze of sorrow and rage. Because I put words to things for a living and to be able to process, that’s what I did. You don’t have to read it, but I had to write it.

Tom Cruise and 19 Dead Children
Nineteen children were killed yesterday in Uvalde, Texas. Ten Black people were killed at a Buffalo supermarket 11 days ago. “Top Gun: Maverick” opens wide on Friday. The third thing has nothing to do with the first two things, right? Right?

Finally, a requiem for a tough guy.

Something Wild: Ray Liotta 1954-2022
One of the most terrifying moments in 1980s cinema comes exactly 51 minutes and 15 seconds into Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” (1986) when Audrey, the manic pixie dream girl played by Melanie Griffith, is dancing at her high school reunion with Jeff Daniels’ Charlie Driggs, a tight-ass office worker she’s essentially kidnapped for the weekend. The mo…

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