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Two-Faced Woman

“If you’ve ever wanted to watch a rigidly square peg try to slink into a round hole, then Two-Faced Woman is the film for you! It’s not that Greta Garbo couldn’t do comedy, she’s a sensation in Ninotchka, but that film built humor around her dour, serious iconography and found a sly way to su” read more

Little Women

“Louisa May Alcott’s oft-filmed story gets a wonderfully warm, charming, if rushed treatment in George Cukor’s celebrated version. Two prior silent film versions, from 1917 and 1918 respectively, beat this one to the screen, but this was the first version where all the disparate pieces came toget” read more

Our Betters

“Our Betters wants to both titillate us with its tale of the idle rich and their different rules for love, marriage, and society while finger wagging over amorality. It wants to build up its main character, an American socialite who married into the British upper class, while also slut shaming her to” read more

What Price Hollywood?

“While not exactly the foundational brick for the four official versions of A Star Is Born (to date, tick-tock on the fifth), What Price Hollywood? is still owed a debt of gratitude and payment when discussing those films. If you were to officially rank it among the four, it would slide obviously abo” read more

Total: from Joy Division to New Order

“Total: from Joy Division to New Order isn’t exactly the all-encompassing expansive set that its title would promise. Joy Division gets a meager five songs out of eighteen, and the last chunk of New Order’s section prove that they’ve been a confused legacy act for a while. I suppose if all you ” read more

The Immigrant

“James Gray’s passion play of a Polish woman discovering the American dream and its seedier realities and rot is built upon the silent era’s pantomime and impressionistic imagery and the melodramatics of the 40s and 50s. The Immigrant is a ripe film that manages to paper over its occasionally wea” read more

Butter

“Butter never goes as balls deep as it often threatens. It’s shallow thrusts at political satire, race, and conservative middle Americana and its weird folksy rituals. It’s dissatisfying as its climax whimpers out when it should shudder and scream.   I think that’s enough metaphorical sexual” read more

American Gangster

“Big, perfunctory, and obviously reaching for the lofty heights of Martin Scorsese’s gangster epics or Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather series, American Gangster is the bloated sight of a former master coasting. Here is a wannabe prestige epic about a real-life figure that coasts along an unearne” read more

Experiment in Terror

“More of a director trying on Hitchcockian suspense and seeing how it fits than a film noir, Experiment in Terror strikes curious poses as it lumbers towards its ending. Far too protracted to keep the suspense going, Experiment in Terror in an experiment alright, but mainly one of the “woman imperi” read more

Murder by Contract

“While watching Columbia Noir on the Criterion Channel, I found that Murder by Contract snuck up on me with the biggest punch. Lean, mean, and enthralling, Murder by Contract is a nasty little B-movie that attacks you with more artistry and firepower than some of its more stuffy, canonized siblings. ” read more

The Lineup

“The first chunk must be endured before you get to the good stuff in The Lineup. Based on a popular TV show of the era, director Don Seigel is clearly enamored with his bad guy more than he is with the stoic cops from the small screen. Why shouldn’t he be when he’s played with typical live-wire i” read more

The Burglar

“I can’t quite claim this one as lost curio of the noir era, but there’s still some sweaty sexual neurosis and a leanness to the narrative that’s refreshing. That doesn’t paper over The Burglar’s messiness, like a sexual assault of Jayne Mansfield that’s disturbing now, and I can’t even” read more

Nightfall

“Jacques Tourneur was one of cinema’s great second stringers. A director who could make the feeblest budgetary constraints outshine its big budget brethren through sheer force of style and atmosphere. He shined brightest when his films were their darkest – Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Out ” read more

Human Desire

“A reunion of director Fritz Lang and stars Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame after the previous year’s successful noir masterpiece, The Big Heat, but this one can’t help but feel a bit like a cooldown. There’s plenty of style to burn and a delicious pair of performances to thrill as often as they ” read more