film noir
Kieron Tyler
True to its title, Pool of London is one of the great London films. More than this, it included British cinema’s first – albeit chaste – interracial romance and convinces as film noir. Filmed in 1950 and released in February 1951, it was passed by the British Board of Film Censors for screening with no cuts. But it did get an “A” certificate, which meant children had to be accompanied by adults. This no children’s film, though.Merchant seamen Dan MacDonald (Bonar Colleano) and Johnny Lambert (Earl Cameron) arrive in London on the freighter Dunbar, which docks on the Thames in the heart of the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The cheerless The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a film which the description "slow-burn" could have been coined for. Watching the story of Robert Mitchum’s low-level criminal Eddie “Fingers” Coyle unfold is a sombre experience but when the climax comes, it is shocking. Coyle is a cog in a machine; a piece of chewing gum to be spat out and trodden on. Anyone and everyone is expendable in his world. Despite knowing the rules of the game and having the nous to expound on them, he is never going to rise to the top.Everyone in this noir-ish film looks unhealthy. Grey skin tones and the pallid dominate Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
When The Man with the Golden Arm was released in British cinemas in January 1956, it was given an “X” certificate by the then British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), which excluded those under 16 from seeing it. Cuts were made to scenes showing the details of drug preparation to obtain that category, and it hit screens at 114 minutes. Some violence was excised, too. A 119-minute version was first seen on home video in 1992 with a “15” certificate. Its last home video release in 2007 shared both the certification and the longer length. This sparkling new DVD restoration is also rated “15”, runs Read more ...
Simon Munk
The old house seems empty at first. But in the darkness, a flickering match your only light source, it quickly becomes apparent that something terrible is here…White Night is a classic haunted house tale and a classic adventure game wrapped up in a beautiful, stylised visual feast. Like the Sin City comics and films, this uses stark black and white with just the occasional flicker of colour, mostly the guttering yellow of a match.In Sin City the stark design is a homage to the chiaroscuro of film noir and hardboiled detective fiction. And perhaps, in homage also, White Night unwisely adopts Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Sin City comics were where their once brilliant creator Frank Miller’s development stopped. The high style of his graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (1986), which inspired the Batman films’ noir grimness and the whole superhero movie boom, was applied to insubstantial, immature tributes to pulp clichés, in black-and-white pages splashed with the red lipstick and blue dresses of its femme fatales. Miller’s co-directing credit with Robert Rodriguez for 2005’s Sin City film is repeated for this belated sequel, which squanders both men’s talents.Miller’s script, sometimes lifted direct Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
“If it bleeds it leads”, proclaims crime news reporter Joe Loder (Bill Paxton) as he investigates the bloody remains of a car crash with his invasive camera lens in a bid to make the biggest bucks out of the exploitation of human tragedy. It’s a mantra which curious onlooker Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal, who has shed a massive 30 pounds for the role) takes to grim and vicious extremes when he sets up his own TV news business. First-time director Dan Gilroy sets his grisly and blackly funny satire of modern media practices and the American dream on a seedy night-time LA canvas which oozes style Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The key lines are “you’re reborn into an untroubled world” – a world “where everyone’s the same.” The 1956 Don Siegel science fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is often taken as a response to America’s fear of Communism and the associated suppression of self, or as a commentary on the encroaching conformity brought by the spread of consumerism and a regimented suburbia. In both cases, homogenisation and standardised behaviour were the potential result.Seeing the film anew does nothing to alter these interpretations. In cinemas again as part of the BFI’s Days of Fear and Wonder Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Some feared that turning Gillian Flynn's bestselling novel into a movie couldn't be done, but with Flynn herself in the screenwriter's chair and the clinically precise David Fincher wearing the director's hat, it's turned out a treat. It's long at 145 minutes, but it needed space to accommodate its titillating mix of police procedural, whodunnit, social satire and psychological drama.Gone Girl is the story of the marriage of Nick and Amy Dunne, a pair of high-profile journalists whose blissfully gilded Manhattan existence has been brought to a shuddering halt by an economic recession which Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
There’s no rest for the wicked and corrupt in Frank Miller’s sequel to Sin City which sees him team up once again with Robert Rodriguez. A series of uninspired but visually alluring vignettes play out demanding you to question what came before and why such a foul follow-up has taken over nine years to come to fruition.Three stories based on the hard-boiled graphic novels of Frank Miller that date back to the 1990s (with a little new material thrown in) are told via the monochrome, highly stylised images that we first saw back in 2005. Johnny (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a death wish and a Read more ...
Simon Munk
A detective ghost story with virtually no violence – Murdered: Soul Suspect is an odd construction. It is part point-and-click adventure game, part interactive fiction and part stealth-adventure – none of which are massively successful elements.While investigating The Bell Killer, a serial killer working his way throughSalem,Massachusetts, your clichéd cop comes off the worse for an encounter. Thrown out of a high window, then shot, you come to as a ghost. Now, in order to be head off into the light, you must find out who your killer is.As a ghost, of course, you no longer have access to guns Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Bradenville is on the way up. The town might only have one bank, but it does have a copper mine and a newly opened pyjama factory. In Arizona, it’s sufficiently isolated to seem the right target for a trio of bad guys looking to help themselves to what’s in that bank. Their plans culminate on a Saturday.The 1955 film Violent Saturday is, potentially, standard film noir. A darkly drawn bank heist caper, it is also a Peyton Place-style melodrama examining the lives of townsfolk, their infelicities, insecurities and foibles. The two styles exist in parallel and meet head on the fateful Saturday Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A woman tramps the streets of Paris looking for a man. It’s night. It’s raining. She pops into bars asking for him. Everyone knows who he is. He’s been seen, but not recently. Earlier, early in the evening, she was supposed to meet him but he hadn’t turned up. She doesn’t know it, but he’s stuck in the lift of an office block. He thought he’d be in and out of the building in moments. While trapped, the car he’d parked across the street has been taken by a leather-jacketed young tough who brings his girlfriend from a florist’s along for the joyride.Lift to the Scaffold has three strands, Read more ...