P-Valley: ‘Perpetratin”
Out of the flotsam and jetsam of flooding in Houston, a mysterious woman in search of a new identity washes up on the shore. When her bus full of evacuees pulls up...
Chinatown (1974)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Chinatown is a detective story, loosely inspired by the California water wars which took place between the fledgeling city of Los Angeles and the surrounding Owens Valley in the early twentieth century. The pivotal figure in those wars was William Mulholland, the chief architect of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, whose career came to an abrupt end with the failure of the St Francis Dam in 1928...
Hard Eight (1996)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - A black and blue semi-trailer truck passes by a coffee shop whose exterior lights are askew, and a man in a dark overcoat waits for the truck to pass, pauses for a moment more, then crosses the road towards coffee. Outside the diner a young man sits on the ground, bedraggled and bestubbled, knees up, arms crossed and looking despondent...
June Film: Port of New York (1949)
Port of New York 82 minutes | 28 November 1949 | United States ‘A film noir shot in semidocumentary style. Two narcotics agents go after a gang of murderous drug dealers who...
January Film: The Great Flamarion Analysis
Based on a short story by the Austrian writer Vicki Baum, The Great Flamarion is full of film history resonance and would seem ripe for critical reassessment: set in the world of...
January Film: The Great Flamarion (1945)
The Great Flamarion 76 minutes | 13 January 1945 | United States ‘Erich von Stroheim is The Great Flamarion, a marksman who employs a married couple for his vaudeville act. Having decided...
September Film: The Stranger Analysis
The Stranger was the third Orson Welles directorial effort to see the light of day and the dark of cinema screens, following Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Production lasted from...
September Film: The Stranger (1946)
The Stranger 95 minutes | 2 July 1946 | United States ‘Set in Connecticut after World War II, The Stranger is a cat and mouse game between Wilson (Edward G. Robinson), a member of...
August Film: Detour Analysis
The production of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 film noir classic Detour is as fabled as the picture itself: reportedly shot over anything from two days up to four six-day weeks, on a small budget costing somewhere...