Killers

Sep 19, 2016 — If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop.

Aug 14, 2016 — While considered to lie outside the highly policed boundaries of film noir, films like Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes nevertheless share many of noir’s stylistic and thematic tropes.

Jun 29, 2016 — In this essay, first published in Grand Street in 1994, Dr. Strangelove coscreenwriter Terry Southern offers a lively behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production.

Jun 28, 2016 — When Stanley Kubrick bought the motion picture rights to the 1958 thriller Red Alert, by the retired Royal Air Force navigator Peter George, he meant to direct an action film about a nuclear war triggered by a solitary madman. Some...

May 10, 2016 — Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place imbues the conventions of film noir with a subtle, tense vulnerability that lends a naturalistic weight to the film’s powerful emotional impact.

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.

Jan 21, 2016 — In Gilda, Charles Vidor’s “violent, sexual, chaotic” noir, the director focused on Rita Hayworth’s skills as an actor and a dancer, eliciting a performance that became iconic in its own right and made her an international superstar.

Nov 18, 2015 — Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood applied cinematic specificity and flair to the literary realism of Truman Capote’s classic “nonfiction novel.”

Sep 8, 2015 — Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.

Jun 29, 2015 — This work of hallucinatory lyricism was one of the final and freest expressions of the rule-flouting New Wave movement in Czechoslovakia.