Point Blank

Left for dead after a heist gone wrong, Lee Marvin’s aptly named Walker crosses Los Angeles with an eerie resolve to find the money and men who betrayed him: a faceless corporate syndicate known only as “the Organization.” Boorman takes this ostensibly straightforward revenge plot and turns it into a kind of modernist ghost story through abrupt flashbacks, unexplained shifts in mise-en-scène, long stretches that unfold under ambient noise or near-silence, and widescreen anamorphic compositions that estrange the city around Walker. The cumulative effect places us in the liminal headspace of a man who may already be dead, and transforms the Organization into an embodiment of diffuse, indestructable institutional power that erases Walker’s personhood even as he guns down its underlings one by one.