Double Indemnity

May 27, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so commonplace that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. Movies, however, reveal this action as more than just the original mode of getting from here to...

May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...

Jan 15, 2019 — In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations—as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things. As the film begins, Alicia is on the...

Dec 12, 2018 — As the commanding presence at the center of Samuel Fuller’s wild feminist western Forty Guns, the great Barbara Stanwyck taps into the tough, no-nonsense bearing she’d honed on-screen since the late twenties, playing the part of a corrupt rancher who...

Nov 28, 2018 — In the 1940s, the nonlinear narrative began to enter the mainstream, as films like Citizen Kane and Double Indemnity boldly did away with the chronological mode that had dominated the cinematic storytelling of decades prior. While the visionary Orson Welles...

Nov 19, 2018 — Billy Wilder proves himself one of cinema’s greatest pleasure seekers in this irresistible confection, a landmark of Hollywood comedy.

Sep 21, 2017 — It’s #StephenKingDay. The author of fifty-four novels, most of them bestsellers, six works of nonfiction, including the widely revered memoir On Writing (2000), and nearly 200 short stories turns seventy today. “The ‘King of Horror’ has sold an estimated 350...

Sep 2, 2017 — “The names Joel and Ethan Coen pop up on a lot of screenplays these days (Bridge of Spies, Unbroken), now that they’re getting credit for the kind of script-polishing they used to do anonymously,” begins Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. “But Suburbicon...

Jul 31, 2017 — What is the defining characteristic of the femme fatale? Critic Imogen Sara Smith explores the range of this film noir archetype through a handful of classic performances.

Sep 21, 2016 — An exhilarating blend of noir and splatter-flick tropes, the Coen brothers’ debut feature established their unique brand of cosmic fatalism.