Strangers Kiss

Fascinating film structured a little like a series of Chinese boxes. First comes the fiction of a young director in Hollywood (Coyote) trying to set up an independent B movie about a young boxer's noir-ish efforts to save a taxi dancer from her villainous protector. This, given the date 1955 and a marked resemblance between the two plots, merges into a speculative 'history' of the circumstances surrounding the making of Kubrick's Killer's Kiss. Then life begins to imitate art as the villainous realtor backing Coyote's movie, in which his girl is playing the lead, realises that she is falling for the actor playing the boxer; and art begins to give life a stage direction or two as Coyote encourages this perilous triangle in the hope of lending emotional conviction to his film. Marvellously shot and finely acted, it grips simultaneously as a critical extension of Kubrick's film, as a comment on movie-making mania, and as a dark thriller in its own right.