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in issue 66

Past Sunset: Noir in the West
"I don't need other people. I don't need help. I can take care of me."

Of Perfect Plans and Acts of Creation: Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
"His plan mirrors Johnny's, that is, pieces of the plan are known to one person: Johnny and Stanley; and not until the end do we see most of their pieces come into place."

in issue 65

In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City
"Noir films with non-urban settings exploded the idea that escape into a safer or healthier world was possible, showing how temptation and violence can attack anyone, anywhere."
By Imogen Sara Smith

Women Larger Than Life: Program Notes 2: King Vidor's Beyond the Forest and Gerd Oswald's Crime of Passion
They're not fifty feet tall, but they might as well be
By Roger McNiven

in issue 58

Whose Noir Is It, Anyway? Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly — Mike Hammer deconstructed, or Mike Hammer disrespected?"

"Give My Love to the Sunrise": The Lady from Shanghai — Welles bids farewell to Hayworth and Hollywood

in issue 48

Distribute This! Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, 1961, U.S.A.) — This missing noir masterpiece enters the canon in first place

in issue 45

Nightmare Alley — Set in a cheesy carnival, the film presents an unforgettable gallery of grotesques whose lives intertwine romantically, criminally, and, ultimately, fatally.

in issue 44

On Commies, Stoolies, and Assorted Lowlife: Pickup on South Street on DVD — While Widmark and Peters turn up the heat, Thelma Ritter steals the show in this seminal noir, now on DVD

in issue 40

"I Like His Face": Nicholas Ray's Noir Classic Restored on DVD — Do you like his face?

in issue 34

The Not-So-Straight Story: David Lynch's Mulholland Drive — It's just Lynch being Lynch. And that's a good thing.

in issue 31

Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour — Detour (1945) has one of the more convoluted plots in noir, packing a flashback structure, an extended voiceover, a cross-country trek, a mysterious death, an "accidental" murder, an identity exchange, an unforgettable femme fatale, and one of the most pathetic, masochistic antiheroes ever into its 67-minute running time.

in issue 29

Fritz Lang's M — The roots of noir go back to German Expressionism, and there's no movie that's more German, Expressionist, or noir than Fritz Lang's masterful M (1931).

High Gallows: Out of the Past — Jacques Tourneur's riveting 1947 film noir, usually ranked as one of the best of the genre

in issue 27

Percolating Paranoia: Fritz Lang's The Big Heat — Fritz Lang brings the terrors of noir into the bright kitchens of America. Watch that coffee pot!

in issue 26

Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir — A review of Foster Hirsch's book on neo-noir

in issue 21

L.A. Confidential — The only things not taken from Chinatown are a post-plastic-surgery makeup job from The Long Goodbye and that gag from "The Lucy Show" where Lucy meets Orson Welles but doesn't believe it's really him: "Why, these fake whiskers wouldn't fool a child!"

the film noir issue

Now online: noir and neo-noir from issue 12 (Spring 1994) of our discontinued print edition

Film Noir's Knights of the Road — "The black sheep of the family, noir's tramps are the tin-age antithesis to Chaplin's golden-age thesis."

Noir Country — Alien nation

Faulkner and Film Noir — Faulkner: "Some good pictures come out of Hollywood. God knows how, but they do."

Beyond the Golden Age: Film Noir Since the 'Fifties — "There is only Noir!"

Mike Leigh's Naked — "Oh, that is excessive"

John Dahl's Red Rock West — "Cage's Michael is a model of the terse, slightly wasted working- class guy who acts as a punching bag for malevolent Fate."

Neo-Noir on Laser: Point Blank, Chinatown, The Long Goodbye — All the colors of darkness