C&C 87: No Cutting for Old Men
On late-career films from veteran directors, plus Billy Hart
Among the many reasons to bury 2025 in salted earth so that it can never rise again, allow me a petty personal one. It was the year of minor medical indignities that made me feel my age. Stopping for an extra breath after climbing a hill. (At least I’m still climbing hills.) A nagging shoulder thing turned elbow thing that according to my doctor is actually a wrist thing. The purchase of drugstore readers to wear in addition to my contacts so I can decipher certain restaurant menus. I’m not ready to be abandoned on an ice floe just yet. But I found myself more receptive to a pair of movies from directors who have been plying their trade for a while, a diplomatic way of saying that they’re older than I am.
The Shrouds (2025) is a work of David Cronenberg body horror that comes from a deeply personal place; the director, who turned 82 this year, has said it was inspired by the death of Carolyn Zeifman, his wife of 43 years. Lead actor Vincent Cassel even sports Cronenberg’s signature coiffure and minimalist wardrobe to lend the proceedings a more autobiographical air. Cassel plays Karsh Relikh, a name that seems like an anagram but doesn’t appear to be.1 Karsh has lost his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) to cancer, but he’s monetized his grief and launched GraveTech, a company employing a high-tech fabric to allow the bereaved to view the decomposing bodies of their loved ones.
At times the film is a chilly, deadpan technothriller. Karsh has cobbled together his enterprise from a variety of vendors, much the way Seth Brundle assembled his telepod in Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986). The shrouds themselves are a Chinese product while a recent hack of the company’s hardware is Russian, both nations determined to transform Karsh’s business into an intelligence asset although it’s unclear what exactly they’re going to learn.2 Less compelling are storylines suggesting Becca’s involvement in a medical conspiracy and her possible infidelity. Karsh, it should be noted, remains close to Becca’s twin sister Terry (also Kruger, who additionally plays Karsh’s AI assistant), which complicates his relationship with her ex-husband and his current tech consultant Maury (a squirrelly Guy Pearce).
Powering The Shrouds past its patchiness is its intimate portrayal of pain. Karsh dispassionately confesses his desire to leap into his wife’s casket at her funeral—an impulse Cronenberg admits he felt himself—and his satisfaction at still being involved with Becca’s body as it molders in the earth. (That he offers up the latter admission as blind date patter is an indication of Cronenberg’s mordant sense of humor.) But it’s in his recurring dreams that Karsh feels the full force of his anguish. Becca repeatedly leaves their marriage bed and returns diminished, parts of herself cut away. Holding her close only results in more broken bones, more misery. Karsh can meet new people and venture to distant lands but grief is a part of him now, like the strange growths on Becca’s bones that obsess him, a physical presence that even the shrouds can see.
The Alto Knights (2025) may be the definitive old guy movie, the cinematic equivalent of a book on submarine warfare you buy for that uncle you don’t really know. It’s directed by Barry Levinson (age 83), written by Nicholas Pileggi (92), and produced by Irwin Winkler (94). Star Robert De Niro is the spring chicken of the company at a spry 82 and he literally does the work of two actors, portraying both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, locked in a gangland feud in the 1950s. I watched the movie mainly because a clutch of critics raved about De Niro’s dueling performances, which play as more than a gimmick. De Niro lets the differing temperaments of the two men—the paranoid Genovese refusing to accept Costello’s word that he’s willing to walk away from the life—do much of the heavy lifting. It’s fun to see De Niro be on the receiving end of his own withering glare for once.
The familiar comforts of the old-school gangster movie are delivered with an unexpected telegraphic approach. Levinson and Pileggi expect the audience to be versed in this material, as if we all ordered Time-Life’s American Mobster books off an infomercial. When Genovese’s cronies begin yapping about “Reles” while Costello testifies during the Kefauver hearings, it would help to have seen Peter Falk’s Oscar-nominated turn as syndicate button man Abe “Kid Twist” Reles in Murder, Inc. (1960) beforehand, because the movie doesn’t slow down to catch you up. And if you don’t already understand the significance of the Kefauver hearings, you’re really out of luck.
Levinson at his best has always been an acute chronicler of creature comforts, his characters striving for signifiers of success. Think of Richard Dreyfuss’s salesman Bill Babowsky in Tin Men (1987) trying to buy a Cadillac without being hustled: “What do I wanna pay? I wanna pay nothing.” The Alto Knights is steeped in dense period detail. Roomy sedans, a range of sharp overcoats, the statement jewelry worn by Costello’s wife Bobbie (Debra Messing).3 I became obsessed with a set of green nesting tables in the Costello penthouse apartment. There’s an authenticity about the appointments, a sense that we’re receiving eyewitness testimony on the texture of a bygone world.
The Alto Knights not only understands it’s part of a tradition, it revels in the fact. Its climax is the infamous Apalachin meeting of 1957, which serves as the set-up for Analyze This (1999), a nearly thirty-year-old comedy that also trades on De Niro’s history with gangster films. It’s fitting that De Niro, as Costello, narrates the action as he did in The Irishman (2019). When an old man tells a story, it’s likely one you’ve heard before. But each rendition holds the promise of some small new revelation, even if it’s only what the old man opts to emphasize this time.
Quentin Tarantino has threatened to retire after his tenth film because “I just don’t want to be an old-man filmmaker.” Living in a gerontocracy, I take the point. “I don’t think the world needs another movie from me,” Cronenberg says in a Criterion Channel interview about The Shrouds. “But we cannot forget the sense of play when it comes to movies … as long as I feel playful, I think it’s worth making another movie.” Levinson and De Niro show some of that same playfulness in The Alto Knights. I’m not making a case for these movies as among the best of the year or on their directors’ filmographies. They’re reports from precincts that only a few have the opportunity to visit, and for that reason alone I’m glad I caught up with them.
What I’m Reading
Cronenberg’s reminder about the sense of play also applies to jazz, where the prevailing ethos seems to be if you’ve got the chops, we’ll find the room. Seeing 91-year-old saxophonist Houston Person perform with the Emmet Cohen Trio earlier this year was testament to that.
The same spirit enlivens Oceans of Time: The Musical Autobiography of Billy Hart (2025), as told to my friend and Substack kingpin Ethan Iverson. Ethan smartly includes an appendix in which he speaks to Hart’s fellow drummers including Kush Abadey, Vinnie Sperrazza, and Nasheet Waits about what they’ve learned from the master.4 The sense that Hart’s recordings remain vital to the generations that followed him courses through the book. As Hart himself says, “If you do make something of quality, it has a chance of staying relevant.”
I enjoyed Billy’s reminiscences of appearing with the Jimmy Smith Trio in Get Yourself a College Girl (1964), a throwaway musical also featuring Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto that I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve watched more than once. During the shoot, Billy notes, “Burt Lancaster came over to greet us, all smiles, obviously happy to meet Jimmy Smith.” (Hart plays on several tracks on Smith’s Christmas ’64, aka Christmas Cookin’, a Chez K seasonal staple.) Billy keeps spreading knowledge, like saxophonist Eddie Harris’s counsel to check out people that nobody likes “because they have a tendency to be more original,” or keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s koan about editing your work in the moment: “Man, play only what you have to play.” Then there are the truths that Miles Davis alone can provide.
Sometimes, you can play behind the beat. That shit swings like a motherfucker. Sometimes, you can play on top of the beat. That shit swings like a motherfucker. Sometimes, you play right in the center of the beat. That shit swings like a motherfucker!
And Billy has wisdom of his own to share. Like, “It always helps to treat every event with optimism” and the essential “Discipline + Humility = Concentration.” Reading Oceans of Time is like eavesdropping on a conversation between musicians after a set at the Vanguard. The Billy Hart Quartet’s Just (2025), with Ethan on piano, Ben Street on bass, and Mark Turner on saxophone, is a gorgeous album. Exhibit A: “Showdown,” composed by Ethan.
Unless ‘Harks her ilk’ means something, and it might.
And, if we’re being honest, how much money Karsh can make from a truly niche product.
Credit production designer Neil Spisak and costume designer Jeffrey Kurland.
Vinnie wrote an excellent review of the book.
VK sentence of the day: “The Alto Knights (2025) may be the definitive old guy movie, the cinematic equivalent of a book on submarine warfare you buy for that uncle you don’t really know.” Beautiful piece Vince!
Thanks so much Vince!