Abel Ferrara keeps us close to violent men, even when we would rather leave. We value his feel for actors and grubby city streets; his insistence on redemption is harder to accept.
Fi1m perspective
In Bad Lieutenant (1992), Harvey Keitel's policeman offers no reassurance simply by turning up to investigate a crime. Ferrara keeps us close to a man whose capacity for harm makes his badge little comfort. We found his distress painful to watch because Keitel makes it matter without making his cruelty any easier to excuse. This is Ferrara at his strongest, trusting an actor to make an appalling person worth our attention.
The route there ran through the urban violence of The Driller Killer (1979) and the revenge thriller Ms .45 (1981), which both drew cult followings. Wider recognition came with King of New York (1990), with Christopher Walken, and Bad Lieutenant. The later European phase includes Pasolini (2014), starring Willem Dafoe, and Tommaso (2019). Dafoe, like Keitel and Walken, became a recurring collaborator, suggesting how much Ferrara values actors willing to look unhinged.
In Bad Lieutenant, cinematographer Ken Kelsch makes New York feel grubby and uncomfortably near. Production designer Charles M. Lagola supplies surroundings that look lived in and neglected, so there is no picturesque escape from the policeman. The difficulty comes with the screenplay, written by Ferrara and Zoë Lund, which keeps pressing the possibility of salvation. His anguish begins to seem a reason to set aside the harm he does, and the religious emphasis becomes overbearing. Keitel has already done enough to make us care; we do not need the extra pleading.
His own acting offers a smaller pleasure in Josh Safdie's Marty Supreme (2025), where he plays Ezra Mishkin. Safdie gives him little to play, relying on a face we believe on sight. It is casting rather than an opportunity to judge Ferrara's acting at any length. Start with Bad Lieutenant for the directing, but do not expect Keitel to make the company pleasant.
Biography
Abel Ferrara is an American film director, screenwriter and actor. Born in the Bronx, New York, on 19 July 1951, he began making Super 8 films as a teenager and studied at Rockland Community College and SUNY Purchase. His feature debut was the low-budget horror The Driller Killer (1979), in which he also appeared under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine.
Ferrara is known for independent New York-set crime films such as Ms .45 (1981), King of New York (1990), Bad Lieutenant (1992) and The Funeral (1996). He has directed episodes of the television series Miami Vice (1984) and worked extensively in Europe since the early 2000s. In 2025 he played Ezra Mishkin in Marty Supreme.
