film noir
Saskia Baron
Hot on the heels of his furiously original sci-fi noir, Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich cranked out this film adaptation of Clifford Odets’s tortured play about tortured artists in venal Hollywood. The Big Knife doesn’t wholly escape its stage origins – most of the action takes place in one Bel Air living room – but Aldrich makes the most of his camera angles and wrings considerable dynamic energy from his cast.Jack Palance plays Charlie Castle, a charismatic movie star living a life of luxury. We meet him boxing in the back yard of his palatial Read more ...
theartsdesk
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).AUGUSTThe Odyssey. Director: Jérôme Salle, starring Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. Jacques Cousteau: le movie. Released 18 AugFinal Portrait. Read more ...
mark.kidel
Many of the best Westerns, that quintessentially American genre, are rooted in a Christian view of the world: the dark forces of Satan pitted against angels, saints and the figure of Christ the Redeemer. In Terror in a Texas Town, Joseph H Lewis's last movie, made in 1956, the conflict between good and evil is laced with strong anti-capitalist undertones, perhaps not surprisingly given that the script was written by the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, with whom Lewis had made his most famous film, Gun Crazy, in 1950. In a small Texas town, a wealthy and ruthless entrepreneur, McNeil, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Using Hollywood stars to prop up British crime thrillers is an ignoble tradition. Guy Ritchie’s Snatch misused Brad Pitt, but John Wayne’s execrable Brannigan is probably the worst example. So one’s hopes aren’t high for Stormy Monday, a 1987 noir starring Sean Bean and Sting, aided and abetted by, er, Melanie Griffiths and Tommy Lee Jones. Fear not – this was Mike Figgis’s feature debut, and it’s a remarkable piece of work, Figgis also responsible for the screenplay and soundtrack. The plot is disarmingly straightforward; Sting’s jazz club is threatened by dodgy developers, and the young Read more ...
David Kettle
The harsh metallic rasp of a cigarette lighter; a glamorous, vulnerable prostitute in distress; a noble lone crime-fighter standing dejected in the rain. All the familiar tropes of noir are present and correct – in fact, almost self-consciously ticked off – in this entertaining thriller from Pete Travis (Dredd, Endgame). But they’re in a jarringly unfamiliar context: this is modern-day, grimy, multi-ethnic west London – located specifically with mentions of Scrubs Lane and Kensal Rise tube station – with its relentless gentrification, luxury housing developments sprouting all around, small- Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Has the British seaside ever looked more alien than in Roman Polanski’s absurdist drama Cul-de-Sac? Filmed on Holy Island, the tide steals the causeway that led craggy American gangster, Richard (played by Lionel Stander) to an isolated, run-down castle where he proceeds to terrorise the couple who live there. Richard’s partner in a heist-gone-wrong drowns slowly in their getaway car – they’ve stolen a driving instructor’s jalopy – and he holes up with George (Donald Pleasence) and Teresa (Francoise Dorléac) and torments them. Very much influenced by Beckett and Pinter, this Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Joan Crawford’s towering, lauded and Oscar-awarded lead performance in Michael Curtiz’s powerful 1945 film Mildred Pierce has the potential to diminish appreciation of the film as a whole. It can be watched for her career-reviving depiction of the titular character, and that could be enough. But it is a film of rare depth, extraordinary subtlety and can be taken many ways. It is about female empowerment, made when many of America’s men were otherwise occupied. It is also about a mother’s sacrifice for her daughter. It has a string of venal characters whose goal is to use others for their own Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Does a review of a 25-year-old film need a spoiler alert? Much of the success of The Crying Game – its 1992 release earned both six Oscar nominations and huge box office returns (although not enough to save its producers from bankruptcy) – is due to its mid-narrative revelation that one of its central characters is not quite as they first appeared.The story centres on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with Miranda Richardson as an icy IRA operative. She seduces a British soldier, Jody (Forest Whitaker, superb despite struggling with a British accent), who is then held prisoner at a run- Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
An action film with an intensity that sets it apart, Assault on Precinct 13 still shocks. Although expected, its first killing is a “they wouldn’t do that, would they?” moment. No wonder the 2005 remake failed to overshadow the original. John Carpenter’s hard-boiled second feature, a follow-up to Dark Star, was filmed on a budget of $100,000 in less than three weeks in late 1975 and released the following year. He wrote, shot and edited it as well as composing and playing its brilliant soundtrack music (the early Human League took a lot from it). With a cast of unknowns, the noir-toned Los Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The Dardennes brothers' latest tale from the grim streets of the industrial suburb of Liège in Belgium is another quietly powerful masterpiece; it’s perhaps their best film since The Child. Re-edited since it debuted at Cannes to mixed reviews, it fuses elements from social realist cinema, morality play and a whodunit murder mystery. The result is a wholly gripping narrative told with understated eloquence.The film opens with no introductions: a young woman, stethoscope in ears, is listening to a patient breathe. Beside her is a man wearing a white coat. There’s shouting from outside the room Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Robert Wise directed the 1959 bank heist thriller Odds Against Tomorrow after the classic film noir cycle had ended, but it's an exemplary noir nonetheless. In its day it was an important transitional work – a race-relations allegory, less well-known or hopeful than Stanley Kramer's 1958 The Defiant Ones, that played its part in the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Harry Belafonte initiated the project for his production company and hired the blacklisted screenwriter Abraham Polonsky to adapt the novel by William P. McGivern (author, too, of The Big Heat). The loot Read more ...
Saskia Baron
In case one thought that turning hit TV shows into movies was a 21st century phenomenon, here comes a restoration of The Small World of Sammy Lee to prove that film-makers were at it back in 1963.Writer-director Ken Hughes's noir drama started off as Sammy, a tense, one-hour, one-location television play made in 1958. Its small screen success allowed Hughes to hire the incomparable documentary photographer Wolf Suschitzky as his DP and cast musical star Anthony Newley for the feature film version. Newley plays Sammy, a small-time hustler in Soho, dodging the bookies' heavies who are chasing Read more ...