Midnight in Paris (dir. Woody Allen, 2011) – I’ve tried, and I can’t get more out of this one than an extremely explicit theme about nostalgia and the film’s seemingly…
This one’s loaded, and up there with some of the great San Francisco films noir, including Thieves’ Highway and, Dark Passage‘s 1946 contemporary from Orson Welles, The Lady from Shanghai.…
Had been probably 15+ years since last seeing this one. (Yes, we watched public domain films noir as children.) Despite some comical screenwriting – and some exceedingly strange “woo-woo” sound…
The Blue Dahlia exemplifies the themes of postwar trauma and the problem of memory with the best of the mid-40s films noir. It deals with these subjects so explicitly and…
A recent cinematic crush on Billy Wilder prompted another sampling of his work, this time the infamous The Lost Weekend. Knowing of Wilder’s later career comedies has made the earlier,…
The second, and decidedly superior product, from Robert Benton last weekend. In the recent Feast of Love, Benton traded in the solid, veteran cast from his previous film Twilight for…
Orson Welles’ last directorial foray in mainstream Hollywood before taking a much-needed break progressively toys and experiments with the medium as the narrative saunters toward its wonderfully shattered ending. The…
One of the most famous films noir, and for good reason, Laura captures the image (of the image!) of the untouchable woman, the “femme fatale,” with camera tilts galore and…
Killer’s Kiss is an example par excellence of a remarkably gifted filmmaker—in this case Stanley Kubrick—forced early in his career to make the most of a film with very limited…
Perhaps it is simply a lesser-known sub-genre of film noir, but the American immigrant setting of Jules Dassin’ Thieves’ Highway seemed quite unusual for a film of this type. One…
The most delightful exploitation of the Kuleshov Effect, and most underrated, has to be Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. This glorious homage to not only film noir but…
The Third Man sets itself apart from other genre clichés by (1) being a British film (despite what the AFI would like to think), (2) being set in postwar Vienna,…
