We didn’t do a “best of the year so far” list, but if we had, this week’s most noteworthy disc release would’ve likely sat atop it, a family drama that repurposes the superhero tropes into something deeply felt and stunning. Also this week: two new… Film | By Jason Bailey ...
In Jules Dassin’s unorthodox noir Night and the City, Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) is a snipe without a career plan, an “artist without an art,” as one character states early on, whose hustling of tourists and quick-cash schemes result in widespread disdain at even a mention of the...
Hill’s love of the textures of ‘50s noir and rock’n’roll flicks eventually drove him to make Streets of Fire (1984), a film conjured almost entirely in an argot of retro tropes. Despite what seemed to be Hill’s commercially amenable fascination with pulp fiction mores, he proved at...
There's so much brilliant stuff inSunset Boulevard, not just in the standard noir tropes about failed ambition and tragic figures, but also specifically with regards to Hollywood and how it treats older actresses, the desperation to stay in the limelight, and the hermetically sealed bubbles that ...
Most crime movies begin in the present and move forward, but film noir coils back into the past. The noir hero is doomed before the story begins — by fate, rotten luck, or his own flawed character. Crime movies sometimes show good men who go bad. The noir hero is never good, just ...
After his flatlining venture into historical biopic with Mank, David Fincher resumed his trademark fare of nihilist noir with The Killer, even reuniting with Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Waller. Michael Fassbender was the title character, one of that mythic cadre of coolly confident and utterly pr...
The 30 best film noir movies of all time, from Double Indemnity to Sunset Blvd, center on an idea: It can be really hard to live in America.
Title: KOJAK: SIEGE OF TERROR Year: 1973 Rating: ***1/2The pilot of the classic series KOJAK is a little different than most of the episodes to come, in that it involves the bad guys more than title character in Telly Savalas' bald tough gu ...
All the tropes were there for a classic time loopy loop switcheroo. It was practically spelled out in the script, wasn’t it? But the film ends, and… it’s not. A serious case ofWTF. “OK, Mikey, calm down, deep breaths, meditate. Let’s wind back the clock, OK!“ ...
‘noir’ was a generic label only retrospectively assigned to certain films by critics, there was still an awareness at the time of a certain kind of crime film that were characterised by certain tropes – a morally compromised male lead, women as deceitful as they are alluring who can only...