Film Noir, Bête Blanche: Blood on the Snow in Fargo
The horror in this film is not the noir violence that it brings to the bucolic Midwestern setting, but the inability of that violence to leave a mark – the[…]
The horror in this film is not the noir violence that it brings to the bucolic Midwestern setting, but the inability of that violence to leave a mark – the[…]
Counterculture · Music & Musicals · Noir
In noir, tales of wrongful accusation tend to play out on mean streets that reflect social inequalities, which at times do have a nasty way of tilting normally upright people[…]
Expanding and redrawing Ginette Vincendeau’s incomplete map of French film noir * * * Let it be said here first: I come to praise Ginette Vincendeau,1 not to bury her.[…]
Actors & Personalities · Noir · War
An examination of two of these émigrés – Fritz Kortner and Ernst Deutsch, major Central European actors, very well known in their home countries before leaving them in duress, both[…]
The box office and critical reaction to many of these film noirs varied wildly and widely, especially with viewers in the middle of the country. “The picture is too long[…]
The Worldwide Film Noir Tradition: The Complete Reference to Classic Dark Cinema from America, Britain, France and Other Countries Across the Globe by Spencer Selby. Ames, Iowa: Sink Press, 2013. […]
A film noir doesn’t have to have an unhappy ending … but it helps. Here are 10 film noir endings that pack an emotional wallop. I Am a Fugitive from[…]
“The morally complex interrelationship of hero/villain, which is partially accountable for the remarkable intensity of his films, has at its roots the film noirs of the 1940s. The darker side of human nature, the interiority of these earlier, psychologically troubled characters, is the determining force in Mann’s noirs. We see the director striving for the depth and complexity of characterization he ultimately achieved in the great films of the 1950s.”
Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, 4th edition; edited by Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio. Hardcover. $49.95. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2010. ISBN 1-59020-144-2. The consensus is clear:[…]
“While films about men with dangerous jobs showed them returning home to supportive, contented wives, films that focused on domestic settings showed women caught in oppressive relationships or warped by the narrowness of their emotional lives.”
“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.”
Billy Wilder (1906-2002) died on March 27, age 95. We honor him by reposting Jason Carpenter’s fine analysis of the master’s work, first published in Bright Lights in 2016. *[…]
At last, seduction: the festival ended on a crescendo with Ennio, Giuseppe Tornatore’s expansive yet intimate tribute to the great Morricone. This is no superficial primer: Tornatore edits the film[…]
Drama · Eco · Eco-horror · Horror
I’ve detailed each film to convey the strange and strict extent to which they each cohere to one base fear: reproductive control. The only hope for human survival in Phase[…]
Directors · Drama · Outsiders · War · Writers & Critics
Rumanian refugee Georges Iscovescu (Charles Boyer) conning a guileless California schoolteacher, Emmy Brown (Olivia de Havilland, in an Oscar-nominated role), into marrying him so he can enter the United States[…]
Each Abel-Gordon-Romy scenario is like a test, or challenge – in heroic terms, a trial – the filmmakers put to themselves, culminating in the couple going it alone for Lost[…]
Directors · Theory · Writers & Critics
One of Assayas’s most ferocious articles he ever wrote (and also one of the most theoretical) attacks le cinéma publicitaire – a film aesthetic (associated in France with Jean-Jacques Beineix[…]