One day I’ll write a great essay on the theme of hypnagogic noir, a subgenre sort of my own creation and one of which I am slowly but surely beginning to trace the important defining features and themes. A few of these features and themes, ones I have already discovered, I’ll write about now in … Continue reading Murder Is My Beat (1955, Edgar G Ulmer)
The Death of Louis XIV is a counter-cultural film; counter-cultural in the truest sense in that it stands in opposition to the dominant contemporary culture and its ideologies. That dominant culture is the twins or kissing cousins of the 24-hour news cycle and the American television/streaming serial drama which equally treat death as a narrative … Continue reading The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra, 2016)
For Nicholas Ray love (or ‘love’) is corrosive. It is unstable and moves with the waves and currents of societal corruption and sickness. Born to Be Bad, despite what Dave Kehr persuasively argued, is not a major work, not a masterpiece and not a particularly important signal in Ray’s career. It sits comfortably somewhere in … Continue reading Born To Be Bad (1950, Nicholas Ray)
Is this the most underrated of Howard Hawks’ films? It is, without a doubt, a masterpiece although it is a film rarely accorded with that distinction (except by the critics, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, who are less fazed by the monolithic canon-complacency of industry-derived or AFI-approved film criticism) and it continues (as far as I’m … Continue reading The Big Sky (1952, Howard Hawks)
