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 [...]

Of all the director-actor-actress triumvirates that made at least two non-sequel pictures together, my personal favorite might be Fritz Lang’s two films with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame - The Big Heat and Human Desire, released in 1953 and 1954, respectively. Lang had pulled a similar trick before, teaming Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett [...]

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 [...]

There are prescient movies, ahead of their time enough for modern viewers to appreciate a retained relevance or uncanny vision into how society would reflect portions of films past, and then there’s Ace in the Hole. What amazes me most about Billy Wilder’s 1951 master work isn’t just how eerily accurate he captured the [...]

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 [...]