Three Films Make A Post: There's the first one. There's the right one. And there's the one you never forget.

Goodnight, My Love (1972): This TV movie set in the classic hardboiled private eye era of the 1940s in Los Angeles prefigures the kind of humour writer/director Peter Hyams – here at the beginning of his career as a feature director - would perfect a couple of years later in Busted and some of his following films. In the film at hand, it’s not quite there yet: the coarseness needed couldn’t really be injected into a TV movie, and the lighter parts of the humour never quite land. What’s left is an atypical role for Richard Boone (with Michael Dunn as his sidekick), a couple of moments where the genre homage actually sings, and quite a few shots that look better than the budget should have allowed.

Baby It’s You (1983): This romance is about as straightforwardly commercial as the film of John Sayles as a director ever got, which is not to say the bad kind of commercial at all. Rather, Sayles’s sensibilities allow him to take a very typical romance set-up and fill it with the kind of life that complicates things while still keeping to the core tenets of the genre (something Sayles always has been particularly good at). So this is a sometimes comedic romance that also talks about class divisions but never lets its interest in the politics of class get in the way. Instead Sayles uses his understanding of these things to strengthen and deepen the story and its characters, thereby getting a stronger emotional resonance. Add two pretty damn great performances by Rosanna Arquette and Vincent Spano, as well as some of the best use of later pop music in a period piece you’ll encounter in a movie life, and you simply have a great film, a romance that’s honest but never wants to be something horrible like an anti-romance.

Into the Picture Scroll: The Tale of Yamanaka Tokiwa (2005): I’m not sure if I should call this a formally atypical documentary or an experiment in narrative filmmaking. Director Sumiko Haneda (who has quickly become a favourite around these parts) retells the story told on one of the most important picture scrolls in Japanese art history with the help of voice work, traditional Japanese ballad storytelling, slow, closely-framed pans over the fantastic art of the scroll, nature shots to establish locations, and some narrative about the life of its creator and how the scroll might mirror some of it.

It’s a fascinating and immersive way to tell a story and the story of the story, turning this into a captivating deep dive into a piece of art and culture that’s also, very quietly and thoughtfully, formally daring. Which appears to have been one of Haneda’s particular talents.

Alphabet City (1984)

Until now, drug dealer Johnny (Vincent Spano) has had quite the career, going up through the ranks fast. Doubts must have trickled in already with the birth of his little baby Renee (Christina Marie Denihan), with his artist wife Angie’s (Kate Vernon) various attempts to talk him out of the life of crime, his partner and friend Lippy’s (Michael Winslow, yes, the guy with the noise imitation shtick) slow descent into addiction, and his younger sister Sophia’s (Jami Gertz) start into the life of a prostitute

The night the film takes place in turns out to be the final straw, though, when Johnny is tasked with burning down the tenement building his mother (Zohra Lampert) and sister are living in. At first he’s just not very happy doing it, but then decides completely against it, well knowing that this will probably lead to very unhealthy consequences for him, while the building’s just going to be burned down by some other asshole as some great career move.

So it’s clear Johnny, together with Angie and the baby, will have to flee New York at the end of the night. Until then, he’s going to drift through the night, steal the money he’s usually collecting for his boss as his own private pension fund (the guy’s going to want to kill him anyway, right?), and try to survive if there are already people after him (which of course there are).

On a plot level, Amos Poe’s Alphabet City sounds like a pretty typical and not terribly original crime movie. It certainly is as close as Poe – coming out of the New York No-Wave – ever came to mainstream cinema. It is still as stylized and weird as you’ll find this sort of plot treated, using the set-up as an excuse for Spano to drift through the neon-coloured New York night, encounter strange people and peculiar variations on standard genre situations. The drug den, for example, must be seen to be believed, and cannot be explained with the few words I have. The genre’s expected action set pieces are staged and filmed as weirdly as the director could get away with too, clearly made with a knowledge of the more classic way to do things and a decision against doing anything that way.

The film’s structure does of course make this an older sibling to other movies about characters drifting and running through neon lit city nights like Into the Night or After Hours, a sub-genre which to me always feels a little like condensed road movies, trying to express the richness and strangeness of a city – or at least a certain number of city blocks – through episodic encounters, trying to capture a spirit of the place more than paint an outwardly realistic picture.

Poe’s New York here is drenched in all the colours of Dario Argento, turning the gritty New York of its time into a dream- and nightmarescape, with Johnny as our increasingly desperate Virgil, pointing out the circles of the damned. Alphabet City is much more an attempt at creating a sense of place through mood and strangeness than a proper narrative; it is also never less than riveting, explaining the love and desperation many of its inhabitants seem to have felt towards their city when this was made in the only way feelings like that can be explained – ambiguously and with a bit of the weird involved.