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[…]
Tagged: noir
Counterculture · Music & Musicals · Noir
Punk Rock: The Psychic Soundtrack of Film 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[…]
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Watch it Again! Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982)
The beautiful grime in Blade Runner challenges you to find humanity in the mechanism of our future, humanity which Scott omits. So we search the frigid replicants for their ghosts,[…]
Without Permission: Three Contemporary Feminist Films and One Classic (Suffragette, Mustang, Under the Shadow, Woman on the Run)
The women in these feminist films have power, but they’re more complex than fatale. * * * In the ultra-buoyant realms of badass, the femme fatale is equal to any[…]
DVD & Blu-ray · Horror · Noir
A Stranger Arrives in Town: Francis Coppola’s TWIXT (2011)
How do you begin a story? If I told you a story begins with the arrival of a stranger in town, you would probably think I was talking about a[…]
Book Review – 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
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. […]
The Foul Sty Underneath: The 5 Greatest Small Town Noirs
If film noir is defined by any single image, it is the dark city. Yet a film doesn’t have to take place in the dark city to be noir. Any fallen world[…]
The 10 Most Devastating Film Noir Endings: Pre-Code to the Present
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[…]
Michael Curtiz – Auteur Without a Theme?
Hungarian-born filmmaker, Michael Curtiz (pictured with Joan Crawford, above), is considered by many to be one of the quintessential Hollywood directors – he is, after all, the man who[…]
X Me Deadly: A Visual Essay
“The thumb isn’t good enough for you. You have to use your whole body.” Naked underneath her trenchcoat, frightened hitchhiker Christina Bailey (Cloris Leachman) gets private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) to[…]
TWO SECONDS to Noirville
Is Two Seconds (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) the first American noir? I’ve read some historians who trace American film noir as far back as Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927). But Underworld,[…]
WINTER’S BONE and the Rural Noir
Although most film noirs take place in an urban setting, the “dark city,” Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik, 2010) shows how the noir vision can thrive almost anywhere – it is[…]
As Above, So Below – World on a Wire and The Thirteenth Floor
A MATRIX OF CONNECTIONS For a long time, I avoided watching The Thirteenth Floor (above) due to the name Roland Emmerich in the credits. Emmerich was responsible in one way[…]
Happy Birthday, Robert Siodmak (And Sorry for all the Misconceptions)
Director Robert Siodmak was born on August 8, 1900, in Dresden, Germany. If alive today, he would be 110. In 1994, in an article entitled Beyond the Golden[…]
The Dark House
The Dark House (Dom ZÅ‚y) Dir. Wojcieh Smarzowski, Poland 2009 What the Inuit language is to snow, Polish is to varieties of squalor and mess. Take melina, an alcoholic’s den,[…]
Revanche (Criterion Collection)
Austrian filmmaker Götz Spielmann likes to capture rooms and the lives within. His camera remains stable or abruptly shifts, as if just discovering the element central to the layout. At[…]
The Epic Actor – Charlton Heston (1923-2008)
To see Charlton Heston in person was to realize that some people are born to be movie stars. He had a larger-than-life presence on-screen. And off-screen as well. In 1980,[…]
Lewton/Tourneur – The Lennon & McCartney of Cinema
Bright Lights After Dark tips its hat to the Val Lewton Blogathon hosted here, and encourages its readers to check out the documentary, Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows,[…]
No Country For Old Men – Breaking the Rules
[SPOILERPHOBES BEWARE!! The following post comments in a general fashion on the endings of No Country for Old Men and The Great Silence, as well as what happens to Marion[…]
Commies, Commies, Everywhere – Tourneur’s The Fearmakers
Commie on a plane – Oliver Blake and Dana Andrews in The Fearmakers Under the credits of Jacques Tourneur’s The Fearmakers (1958) we see a bearded Dana Andrews being tortured[…]
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