The King of Marvin Gardens (Bob Rafelson, 1972)

The second of Rafelson's collaborations with Jack Nicholson suffered from the expectations raised by the previous year's seminal Five Easy Pieces. To be sure, it doesn't deliver as much resonance or depth as its predecessor's melange of emotional stiflement and laconic humour, but radiates a skewed froideur of its own nevertheless, with the weathered boardwalks and derelict music halls of a wintry Atlantic City as much the star as Nicholson's melancholic talk radio host and Bruce Dern as his pipe-dreaming speculator brother. The dialogue retains a perceptive crispness that some of its more flaked-out surreal interludes have rather lost with the passage of time.

6/10