Blast of Silence: Criterion Collection
April 17, 2008
Many film noir buffs cite Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) as the last film of the genre’s classical period but an argument can certainly be made for Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence (1961). As Terrence Rafferty’s liner notes for this DVD point...
The Two Jakes: Special Collector’s Edition
December 18, 2007
Making a sequel to a classic film like Chinatown (1974) was never going to be easy. How do you equal or surpass the original? Robert Towne, who wrote the first film, penned the next installment. However, the film’s original director, Roman Polanski,...
Brute Force
April 9, 2007
Jules Dassin brought his style of hard-hitting, unflinching realism to the prison melodrama genre as he depicts the harsh world behind bars in Brute Force (1947). The first shot of the prison is a low angle one looking up at a watch tower at night in...
The Naked City
March 16, 2007
Producer Mark Hellinger was interested in making a crime movie in the same vein as Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) except that New York City would be the main character. His main writer, Malvin Wald, gave him a screenplay entitled Homicide and Arthur...
Double Indemnity: Special Edition
September 7, 2006
“It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along that street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle? Maybe you would have known Keyes the minute she mentioned accident insurance,...
Brick
August 21, 2006
Rian Johnson’s debut film Brick (2005) caused something of a minor sensation among critics and discerning cineastes earlier this year when it won the Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision at the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an...
Kiss of Death
February 24, 2006
Kiss of Death (1947) belongs in a sub-genre of film noir that blends a documentary style with a noir look and sensibility. Nick Bianco (Mature) is a jewel thief caught and sent to prison. While waiting to be sentenced he meets Tommy Udo (Widmark), a sadistic...
Sin City: Recut Extended Unrated
February 16, 2006
It only makes sense that if one is going to adapt a comic book into a film that it be faithful in look and tone to its source material. Otherwise, why adapt it in the first place? Of course, there is always the danger of being too faithful to the look...
Sin City
January 29, 2006
Sin City began as series of graphic novels created by Frank Miller as loving homages to the gritty pulp novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane and classic film noirs from the ‘40s and ‘50s. Miller’s world—the dangerous,...
The Ice Harvest
December 12, 2005
The Ice Harvest (2005) is a pitch black comedy set in Wichita, Kansas on Christmas Eve. Charlie (Cusack) is a mob lawyer who has stolen $2 million of his boss’ (Quaid) money with the help of Vic (Thornton), a local pornographer. Charlie has a thing...
