(This is also at the DVD Times site. Same content both places. I just wanted to have it here too.)
When Warner Home Video opted last year to drastically change its business model in terms of classic film releases in R1, the impact was most felt by those who had loyally been purchasing the studio’s box [...]

^ That’s the shot from Murder by Contract that leads into Vince Edwards’ hitman Claude posing as a barber and taking the first step in his new career. Great, sly use of humor there. I felt like there was probably more to explore with that film than time and space comfortably allowed in my new [...]

While usually steeped in the anxiety which met and followed World War II, film noir can, on rare occasions, take place prior to the 20th century. There are a few examples set during the Victorian period (with John Brahm’s Hangover Square being a particular standout), but, otherwise, the only director I’m aware of who was [...]

Otto Preminger’s 1953 light drama The Moon Is Blue, when remembered at all, is usually recognized as being the first post-Code Hollywood film where the word “virgin” is uttered and there may be some vague association with other censorship battles beyond that single word (which is said several times). Dig deeper to find out that [...]

The bookends of Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face (Les Yeux sans visage) consist of a wordless journey, given demented affection by Maurice Jarre’s score, to dispose of a female corpse dressed in men’s clothing and the escape of one animal after another, culminating in the brutal poetry of angry dogs attacking their captor and [...]

In the spring of 1958, director Nicholas Ray was tumbling a bit commercially. Ray’s filmmaking had never been exactly easy. Like his fellow Wisconsin native Orson Welles, it was on Ray’s first picture, the young lovers on the lam film noir They Live by Night, where he had the greatest control of his career and, [...]

While Nicholas Ray’s work is still treated with little respect on DVD in R1, there are a couple of films he directed which seem especially difficult to track down. One, which I’ve still not seen, was a project Ray made for Paramount, between Johnny Guitar and Rebel Without a Cause, called Run for Cover. The [...]

Among the actors and actresses most at home in film noir, the ideal teaming, as evidenced by the header on this site, would be Sterling Hayden and Gloria Grahame. He of the tall, strong, Scandinavian stock flecked with cool authority and she burning with a pouty sensuality that flashes a warning you won’t heed. When [...]

(This was supposed to accompany a review of the new DVD release, but Universal didn’t send me a copy. I wrote it after a theatrical screening a few weeks ago, and there’s no reason to let a few hours of writing go to waste.)
It’s either to Orson Welles’ credit or the result of a contrarian [...]

Even several years into the DVD format, it’s still a pleasant surprise when one particular filmmaker has multiple, unrelated releases hit shelves around the same time. Now, over 40 years since his untimely death, 2008 seems to have accidentally turned into the year of Anthony Mann in R1. His two epics, El Cid and The [...]