By Joshua Cornelius

Filmmakers go to drastic lengths to create enduring cinema.  To create a film that is truly timeless is an art unto itself.  I believe Léon accomplishes just this.  Unfortunately behind the scenes documentaries often breath a startling amount of context into the time in which the film was made.  HBO’s making of documentary is no exception.  Behold a younger, startlingly less rotund Luc Besson, an oddly bespectacled Gary Oldman and a young Natalie Portman looking like a newly wedded sister-wife.  If anything, this compact, affectless documentary is just like every other piece of marketing pap generated by HBO to fill the gaps between films.  It’s also a reminder of the talent required to make a film holding no bearings from such an eagerly bombastic time as the early 90s.  While it’s not the grand ode to a classic film we might hope for, it’s nice to see the spectacle produced and preserved long after… well in the age of YouTube.