Cruising 4K 1980 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

After a series of violent crimes among New York homosexuals, an undercover cop goes in search of the killer. Detective Stephen Burns has to infiltrate the most notorious places of New York and become his own in the circle of sado-masochists.

Review 4K Movie

I must confess that Friedkin is not my favorite director. I prefer his cheerful 'The French Connection' to the psychedelic and nervous Frankenheimer sequel, and 'The Exorcist' to the parody with Leslie Nielsen. However, it's not all that bleak. And it was with 'Cruising' that my introduction to his work began.

Gay culture was new to me at the time. I was a little wary of it. No, I had never been homophobic towards men. It was just something completely 'out of our world', outlandish and mysterious. And despite the fact that many people see open contempt and hatred for homosexuality in the movie, 'Cruising' did not arouse such emotions in me.

The most interesting thing about the movie is its atmosphere. The question 'who is the killer?', classic for thriller-detectives, is absent here. It's not the point. It's like 'Man Overboard' with Goldie Hawn, where her heroine from the world of the rich and respectable fell into a 'sweaty backwater'. And she's never going to be the same. Because the mind is expanding. Old values die out. New ones are born. And now you can choose.

Al Pacino's character, having plunged into an incomprehensible, forbidden, dangerous world, is no longer able to return to the average boring and measured life. Perhaps homosexuality in 'Cruising' is indeed compared to the world of drugs or crime. But that's no reason to berate it. Or to praise it.

The young Pacino plays surprisingly frank and sincere. He has played a gay man once before - in Lumet's 'Dog Day Afternoon'. But where Lumet as an old and frigid documentarian mechanically reproduces a day in the life of incomprehensible to him and not interested in his losers, Friedkin like a latent gay voyeurist observes in the keyhole behind the subculture, repulsive and at the same time attracted by its dissimilarity to the outmoded scheme of 'work-wife-children-pension'.

An atmospheric, dragging, unnerving and 'uncomfortable' movie. One of the best roles of the young and not yet mired in self-parody Al Pacino.