{"id":938249,"date":"2026-07-16T06:18:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-16T06:18:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/938249\/"},"modified":"2026-07-16T06:18:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T06:18:17","slug":"motor-city-review-like-a-scorsese-opera-without-dialogue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/938249\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Motor City’ Review: Like a Scorsese Opera without Dialogue"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe needle drop as we know it was born in 1969, with the instantly iconic use of \u201cBorn to Be Wild\u201d in \u201cEasy Rider.\u201d There were precedents, of course. The first use of a rock \u2018n\u2019 roll song in a movie was \u201cRock Around the Clock\u201d played over the opening credits of \u201cThe Blackboard Jungle\u201d (1955), and by any measure the godfather of the needle drop was Kenneth Anger<\/a>, whose 28-minute-long 1963 bikers-and-drugs-and-Jesus-and-leather-queers-gone-pop \u201cScorpio Rising\u201d \u2014 in my estimation, one of the 10 greatest films ever made \u2014 invented the ecstatic juxtapositions that inspired the premier cinematic poet of the needle drop, Martin Scorsese. Which filmmakers have given us the greatest needle drops? The answer is Scorsese (the aesthetic son of Kenneth Anger), Tarantino (the son of Scorsese), Paul Thomas Anderson (the son of Tarantino), and, from a very different track, the Michael Mann of \u201cManhunter\u201d (a movie I\u2019ll write about next week, when it\u2019s released for its 40th anniversary).<\/p>\n

\n\tI zip through this history because there\u2019s a needle drop in \u201cMotor City<\/a>,\u201d the startlingly high-wire new crime thriller (it\u2019s got love, violence, suspense \u2014 but no dialogue), that earns comparison to the work of all those other directors. And so I want to be clear that we aren\u2019t simply talking about an ordinary needle drop but, rather, the visionary hypnotic kind.<\/p>\n

\n\tSet in Detroit in 1977, the film introduces us to John Miller (Alan Ritchson<\/a>), an ex-con and Vietnam veteran who is burly and blockish enough to look like he\u2019s halfway between Bruce Banner and the Hulk. But in his G.I. Joe haircut, he\u2019s trying to walk the straight and narrow. We have seen that he\u2019s in love with Sophia (Shailene Woodley<\/a>), his live-in girlfriend, who he gets down on one knee to propose to (an offer she gratefully accepts). And we\u2019ve witnessed a rather strange crime in which his vintage green \u201970s muscle car was stolen\u2026and then returned to him. By this point, we like Miller and Sophia well enough to want to see them happy.<\/p>\n

\n\tThen the familiar, deliberate plucking of an acoustic guitar comes on the soundtrack, and we recognize the intro to \u201cThe Chain,\u201d the great Fleetwood Mac song from 1977. In a scene that unfolds in slow motion, a canister of tear gas is tossed into the couple\u2019s home, tearing through their veil of domestic bliss. Police detectives burst in and demand to see Miller, who from what we can tell has done nothing wrong (in fact, he\u2019s just completed his parole requirement). Outside, the cops, led by a dry sinister officer in a long black leather coat, order him to get on the ground, face down; Sophia comes out of the house and is placed in the back of a car, staring at all this through the glass. As the cops open the trunk of Miller\u2019s car and fish out kilos of drugs, our mounting horror and dread is echoed, but oh so ironically, by \u201cThe Chain,\u201d which is playing throughout all of this. The song is a slow build, one that finally explodes into that gorgeously melancholy up-tempo climax (\u201cCha-a-a-ain\u2026keep us together!\u2026Runnin\u2019 in the shadow!\u201d), and it elevates the fear and trauma of what we\u2019re watching into the purest opera. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tStaging a great needle drop isn\u2019t the same thing as directing a great movie. But Potsy Ponciroli<\/a>, the director of \u201cMotor City\u201d (which opens July 24), has an operatic temperament in a large way. He has made a stylized crime drama that\u2019s full of pop music, and also full of naturalistic sound, so that it looks and feels more or less real, only the characters don\u2019t converse. (They say an occasional throwaway word here or there.) Even when two of them are just seated in the booth of a diner, what passes between them is suggested by looks, gestures, and our ability to read the situation. The reason this works is that we\u2019ve seen enough thrillers to be able to color in the essence of the dialogue ourselves; we don\u2019t need to hear the words. And without them, we plug into the sheer presence of the actors. At times, \u201cMotor City\u201d is like a silent movie directed by Scorsese. It draws us in because it\u2019s got a glittering underworld-opera surface, but also because the audience needs to use its noodle a bit to participate in the film\u2019s telling.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMotor City\u201d offers up Detroit as a gritty and squalid place, a crumbling purgatory with a period rock vibe (posters of Styx and Zappa) that\u2019s the perfect setting for crime drama. The sound of David Bowie\u2019s \u201cCat People (Putting Out Fire),\u201d heard in a revamped version (at this point, the song is a reference to a reference to a needle drop), sets the tone of dread-soaked rapture, and a flashback to what happens in the alleyway just outside a scuzzy club gives us all the drama we need. That\u2019s where Sophia, hanging out of her dress like a \u201970s \u201cfloozy,\u201d first meets Miller, who resembles a party boy carved out of marble. The twist is that she\u2019s already attached to Reynolds (Ben Foster<\/a>), who looks like a dweeb \u2014 but is, in fact, an extremely wealthy and powerful drug kingpin. Miller wound up taking Sophia right out from under Reynolds\u2019 controlling gaze. The cops come to Miller\u2019s house because Reynolds, out for revenge, has set him up.<\/p>\n

\n\tA headline, glimpsed in a newspaper box, tells us that Miller has received a 25-year sentence for possession of narcotics. That\u2019s what happens when you steal an underworld boss\u2019s girlfriend. And now Reynolds has taken Sophia back. He comes to visit Miller in prison, giving him a photograph of himself and Sophia (they\u2019re married now), with an inscription scrawled on the back: \u201cYou should have seen the honeymoon.\u201d Ponciroli stages a powerful sequence, set to Donna Summer\u2019s \u201cI Feel Love,\u201d that\u2019s all about Miller\u2019s jealous fantasies, and \u201cMotor City\u201d keeps tightening the screws of sadism and vengeance. It\u2019s also got a diligent cop and a few canny twists, like one that hinges on a wedding ring. Written by Chad St. John, it\u2019s a grungy piece of primal pop that recalls everything from \u201cDrive\u201d to David Lynch to the primitive low-budget ingenuity of \u201cDragged Across Concrete.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI was a fan of Ponciroli\u2019s sneaky, stylish 2021 Western, \u201cOld Henry,\u201d<\/a> starring Tim Blake Nelson as a varmint who wasn\u2019t to be messed with. But \u201cMotor City,\u201d while it\u2019s a less perfect film, demonstrates that Ponciroli has a talent I think could be explosive in a mainstream movie. If I were a producer or studio head, I would sign him up immediately. He brings out an expressiveness in his actors (that\u2019s a big part of what makes the film work), and there\u2019s an audacity to his choices that can feel rhapsodically right, as when he stages an intricate prison-escape sequence to the Moody Blues\u2019 \u201cNights in White Satin.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, the last part of the movie falls off in a rather inexplicable way. Miller, having broken out of prison (with a dagger made of smelted candy), is going to get his revenge, but for some reason the movie\u2019s needle drops drop out, replaced by a blandly orthodox suspense score. Did Ponciroli suddenly lose the rights to songs that he\u2019d been planning to use? The trouble is, it feels like a violation of the film\u2019s aesthetic, not to mention a colossally blown opportunity. I was greatly looking forward to scenes of ultraviolence set to the last songs on earth you\u2019d imagine them being set to. And the epilogue, which takes place many years later, feels like a miscalculation. But \u201cMotor City,\u201d as its best, qualifies as a true immersive cinematic experience. It\u2019s a movie almost entirely without words, but it speaks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The needle drop as we know it was born in 1969, with the instantly iconic use of \u201cBorn…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":938250,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[78077,78080,171,78084,53,78082,78083,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-938249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-alan-ritchson","tag-ben-foster","tag-entertainment","tag-motor-city","tag-movies","tag-potsy-ponciroli","tag-shailene-woodley","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116928204607427611","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=938249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/938249\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/938250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=938249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=938249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=938249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}