Dec 16, 2016 — Earlier this week, we released our edition of John Huston’s 1950 heist film The Asphalt Jungle, whose combination of meticulous plotting and sympathetic characterization remains a blueprint for the genre. Set amid the smoky streets of an unnamed city in...

Dec 13, 2016 — John Huston’s meticulously calibrated crime film combines nail-biting suspense with a mood of Chekhovian regret.

Feb 1, 1988 — Based on the novel by W.T. Burnett, this heist film set in a nameless midwestern city offered moviegoers in 1950 a new view of crime.

The fashion designer recalls a favorite scene from The Asphalt Jungle, talks about her love of films about childhood, and celebrates her friends David Lynch and Agnès Varda.

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Jan 15, 2017 — To make the performance of a tedious, exacting, time-consuming task riveting to watch, it is only necessary for the activity to be illegal.

May 21, 2025 — The exiled American director of Try and Get Me! and Hell Drivers depicted crime and violence as the inevitable results of capitalist competition.