Here’s a think piece by Cahier du Cinema‘s Herve Aubron that’s so French think-piecey it turns into a marble statue with a baguette up its butt as you’re reading it. The premise is that Michael Mann and M. Night Shyamalan have “a shared taste for the lackluster and the dull. The worlds of Mann and Shyamalan are gray because they are limbs. Their occupants are already dead. In Shy, the motif of the phantom persists well beyond the final reversal in The Sixth Sense. In Mann, it is less a question of phantoms than of condemned persons in a hurry to be executed. Already dead, in the sense that their execution is already intended and decided — they run to meet it.” De Niro’s Neil in Heat or Cruise’s Vincent in Collateral may have an inner death-wish thing going on, but their sense of alertness and urban vitality is so acute it’s a contact high.