There are two schools of thought on what makes a good box set. The first is what you might call the blockbuster principle: just assemble as impressive a collection of hits as you can. Certainly, that works – there’s a reason there are so many anthologies of Hitchcock and Coen […]
film noir
Keyframe 117 – Death Metal Trash Panda
The Grifters (1990) Punk-ish Neo-Noir that kick-started one of the best eras of crime cinema (Review)
101 films co-produced a new making-of documentary for Stephen Frears’ The Grifters. In which, a producer states that Martin Scorsese believed Jim Thompson’s novel of the same name was among the best crime novels that hadn’t been adapted and so sought to amend that fact. With the legendary Taxi Driver […]
Le Corbeau (1943) All too relevant given the current state of global politics (Review)
Manina, the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter (1949) Host to the Best Extra Feature of 2017? (Review)
Let’s get the big issue out of the way first: Eureka’s new Blu-ray release of Manina, the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter by Willy Rozier boasts the most unexpected and delightful extra feature of the year. It actually pertains not to the title feature, but to another Rozier film included as a bonus, […]
Body Heat (1981) Double Indemnity Reinvisioned as a Sexy 80s Neo-Noir (Review)
The Lady from Shanghai (1947) Orson Welles Infamously cut-to-pieces Noir Returns (Review)
The Glass Key (1942) & The Veronica Lake Show (Review)
In his 1970 essay Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir, Raymond Durgnat suggests that the genre’s most common topics developed as a method of plausible deniability. As the Red Scare hotted up, left-leaning directors could address corruption in, say, prisons or boxing and have it stand as a microcosm […]
Suture (1993) Philosophy of the self and the elephant in the room (Review)
A keen suspension of disbelief is key to enjoy genres founded on wonder, whimsy and exaggeration, not having a healthy penchant to believe the unbelievable locks swathes of the more imaginative hues of cinema behind locked doors. Curious it is then that 1993’s existentialist noir about the reconstruction of the […]
Violent Saturday (1955): Technicolour noir in picture-perfect small-town America (Review)
After a quiet spell, Eureka has returned to their Eureka Classics label with the release of The War Lord, following close behind that is Richard Fleischer’s Violent Saturday, a spiritual companion to the recent release of Don Siegel’s The Killers and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye. This 1955 film is an […]