Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara was born in the Bronx in 1951 and started at the very bottom of the industry, directing and starring in The Driller Killer as an artist coming apart in a downtown loft. Ms .45 followed. Both are exploitation films by budget and distribution, and both have far more on their minds than the marketing suggested, which has been the pattern ever since.

The reputation rests on the New York crime run: King of New York, Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral. What separates them from every other gritty urban thriller of that period is that Ferrara is genuinely, unfashionably interested in damnation. His criminals are Catholic, and the films treat the possibility of grace as a real question rather than a decoration. He is also a serious visual stylist, working in a neo-noir register he keeps bending out of shape, and he uses violence as a moral event rather than a set piece.

The second half of the career looks nothing like the first. After Welcome to New York he moved into loose, cheap, essayistic filmmaking made well outside the American studio system: 4:44 Last Day on Earth, Tommaso, Siberia, Zeros and Ones, Padre Pio. These ask a great deal more patience than the crime films, and they divide people who love the early work.

He also acts, in his own films and other people's, most recently as Ezra Mishkin in Marty Supreme, with smaller turns in Black Butterfly and Daddy Longlegs.