It’s a little hard to believe that a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda, and adapted from a Graham Greene novel could remain mostly unknown and unseen sixty years after its release.  Even more peculiar, Ford claimed the film as his favorite or one of his favorites (depending on the source) throughout the [...]

With the official announcement of the Warner Bros. Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4, enthusiasts can rejoice at the prospect of twice as many films as in the other three volumes, at the same price, and all with commentaries and featurettes. There are some real gems in there too, highlighted by Nicholas Ray’s debut [...]

The unofficial Criterion forum has been conducting a “Lists Project” for a couple of years now. Members submit a list of 50 films from a particular decade every few months and the results are tallied into the top 100 vote getters. At the end of January, a new list for films from the [...]

It seems there are two camps regarding Sergeant York, the 1941 unabashed piece of propaganda directed by Howard Hawks. There are many who’ve embraced its sense of folksy Americana and family values woven into the story of a pacifist war hero. For these people, the film is a beloved classic that represents a [...]

Scarlet Street, like other movie titles derived from names of roads both fictional and real, such as Sunset Blvd. and Mulholland Dr., is not the type of area most people would want to call home. In Fritz Lang’s film, sympathy and goodness are lurking elsewhere, leaving us instead with characters like Edward G. Robinson’s [...]

Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne is an absorbing, even touching, melodrama that’s perhaps wrongly characterized as a love story as well. The fairly simple narrative begins when Hélène is accompanied on a car ride home by Jacques, who warns that her lover Jean has fallen out of love. Next, in [...]

I’m continuing my unofficial series on films unavailable on DVD that were directed by Mitchell Leisen and written by brilliant future writer-directors (see Midnight) with Remember the Night, from 1940. Scripted by Preston Sturges, the film is set at Christmas in New York City (although Paramount released it in early January for some reason, [...]

Humans are so easily seduced by beauty that we often associate it with positive qualities such as virtue, innocence and goodness. Regardless of how much we know about beautiful things, we want to think the best of them and often demonstrate an unearned sense of trust as though they’re somehow above normal fallibility. [...]

There’s something perversely appealing about a movie that stars Humphrey Bogart, voted the number one movie star ever by the American Film Institute a few years back, yet prevents the audience from seeing his face for 2/3 of the picture. Dark Passage does just that and, while it may not be among Bogart’s absolute [...]

The Leopard Man, directed by Jacques Tourneur, is a truly creepy and somewhat frightening film produced by the legendary Val Lewton in 1943. Lewton was an RKO producer who somehow managed to turn small budgeted horror films into mini-masterpieces of psychological terror in the 1940s. In 1943 alone, Tourneur directed this film, as well [...]