film noir
Nick Hasted
Anxiety, injustice and desperate disorder are the themes of these six disparate noirs. In one, The Dark Past, Lee J. Cobb’s psychiatrist draws a crude diagram of the brain with a line dividing the conscious and unconscious, and these films visit the choppy depths under the surface calm of suburban Cold War America, its terrors in the night.Venturing beyond the obvious classics, Columbia Noir #3 shows the range and intensity of Hollywood’s response to the post-war malaise. Often blighted by the House Un-American Activities Committee’s anti-communist witch-hunts, and increasingly shot in real Read more ...
mark.kidel
The problem with much neo-noir is that it’s ersatz – too self referential for its own good. Peter Medak’s noir is as dark as it gets, but the hell he portrays is a shade too knowing, tainted with irony and excess.Romeo is Bleeding (1994) showcases a slimline and youthful Gary Oldman. He's always good on screen, here as Jack Grimaldi, a cop so bent that he hardly remembers what it is to be straight. His opponent is the best thing in the movie: Swedish actress Lena Olin as a ruthless and sizzlingly sexy hit-woman. Medak is good at erotic tension, and the scenes in which the über-sadistic hired Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The cheaply made experimental exploitation indie Dementia (1955) is one of those footnotes in movie history that makes cultists salivate. And with good reason – it’s a wry blend of film noir and horror that makes you wonder if it was a touchstone for Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1957) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001).The 61-minute movie – which features sound effects but no dialogue – unfolds in real time. In her room in a seedy Hollywood hotel, a psychotic woman (Adrienne Barrett) – called "The Gamin" in the credits – clenches her sheets as she lies in Read more ...
theartsdesk
There are films to meet every taste in theartsdesk's guide to the best movies currently on release. In our considered opinion, any of the titles below is well worth your attention.Enola Holmes ★★★★ Millie Bobby Brown gives the patriarchy what-for in a new Sherlock-related franchiseEternal Beauty ★★★★ Craig Roberts's fantasy conjurs surreal images and magnetic performancesI'm Thinking of Ending Things ★★★★ Charlie Kaufman's eerie road trip through love and lossLes Misérables ★★★★★ An immersive, morally complex thriller set in the troubled suburbs of present day ParisMax Richter's Sleep ★★★★ Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The 1942 thriller This Gun for Hire, which opened five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was closely adapted from Graham Greene’s 1936 novel A Gun for Sale by Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett and directed for Paramount by the veteran William Tuttle. Though no masterpiece, it's a film noir landmark – an essential watch.Noir style wasn’t yet fully established, but there are glimmerings of them here in cinematographer John Seitz’s low-key lighting and Hans Dreier’s disorienting sets. The film’s fatalistic tone was marred by touches of comedy, a near-Gothic interlude Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
Ennio Morricone was a genius, or as close to that description as makes no odds. If we mean someone who created a unique body of work, one that changed culture, had a distincive style and was massively influential, then Morricone fitted the bill. theartsdesk's Joe Muggs was discussing today on Facebook and Mixmag his influence on dubstep and Jamaican music, for example. He was uncompromising, never learning English or moving to Hollywood, however much he was cajoled by film types there.It appears he saw his non-film music as the serious work and posterity will no doubt give the verdict on that Read more ...
mark.kidel
Criss Cross is a superbly taut film noir, a 1949 drama that unfolds with the inevitable downward spiral of ancient tragedy. Its doomed characters are prisoners of a hopeless struggle for freedom, caught in the web of their transgressive desires.Steve, whose tortured soul and desperado’s ambitions are beautifully rendered by Burt Lancaster, works for an armoured truck company. In a plan that feels doomed from the start, and in order to free Anna, the woman he loves passionately, from the clutches of the coolly ruthless gangster Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea), Steve offers himself as the inside man Read more ...
Joseph Walsh
Romanian filmmaker Corneliu Porumboiu has made a career crafting perceptive and cerebral examinations of his native country. From his 2006 debut 12:08 to Bucharest to The Treasure, they were cerebral films that powerfully embodied the Romanian New Wave. With his latest film The Whistlers, Porumboiu shows he’s capable of being both a brilliant filmmaker and playful at the same time. It’s an impish noir thriller, full of femme fatales, crooked cops and sun-drenched islands. We begin on the island of La Gomera, the pearl of the Canary Read more ...
graham.rickson
Curling could be an enigmatic contemporary noir, but for the fact that it was made in the depths of winter in rural Quebec. Shades of brilliant white and murky grey predominate, as witnessed in an early sequence where Jean-François and his 12-year old daughter Julyvonne trudge home from an optician’s appointment along a windswept snowy road. Spurning the offer of a lift from a police officer, Jean-François’s reluctance to engage with the outside world is established within minutes. A craggy, taciturn loner holding down a couple of menial jobs, he’s an over-protective single parent unwilling Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Waking at a pivotal moment in Black Angel, alcoholic songwriter-pianist Marty Blair (Dan Duryea) momentarily mistakes his new professional partner Catherine Bennett (June Vincent) for his estranged wife Mavis Marlowe (Constance Dowling). Each is a radiant blonde singer, but to Marty they are polar opposites: Catherine the madonna, Mavis the whore.The shot that almost merges them indicates that Marty – his Oedipus Complex unresolved – turns every woman he loves into a femme fatale. This isn’t cod Hollywood psychologising but precise Freudianism, and it's deeply disturbing. Mavis is Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Marketed as a couples-friendly romance, Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night made a massive $37 million on its opening day in China but was subsequently denounced by irate viewers who felt they’d been conned into watching a neo-noir pastiche that bafflingly morphs into a journey into the hero’s unconscious mind. Films comprised of reality, dreams, fantasies, and memories are not for everyone. However, fans of directors Alain Resnais, David Lynch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Nicolas Roeg, and Wong Kar-wai will likely find this art-house stunner an enrapturing experience.Bi’s follow-up to his impressive Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Edward Norton has wanted to adapt Motherless Brooklyn since Jonathan Lethem’s acclaimed novel was first published 20 years ago. His film (as producer, writer, director and star) is an obvious labour of love, an evocative, entertaining, old-fashioned gumshoe noir, which fits snugly within the traditions of the genre while offering a refreshingly atypical hero.Forget Bogart’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, or Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes – sharply tailored, fast-talking, ineffably cool. Lionel Essrog (Norton) is a fledgling private eye with Tourette’s Syndrome, who can’t help but fire off spontaneous Read more ...