The natural human inclination is to assume that anything which is rare must also be of high quality, and this has led many of the few people who have been able to see Billy Wilder’s long-lost Ace in the Hole from 1951 (released for the first time on any home video format last week) to […]

From the files of: “Hey, I’ve owned that DVD for more than a year, I should really think about watching it!” And now, the Golden Delicious apple. Come back with me to the late 1940s. World War II is over and America celebrates by inventing Suburbia, as both place and attitude. The ideal of this […]

Journey with me to 1935, when sound cinema had not yet ended its first decade of life, and Hollywood was still a home to experimentation and radicalism. When a 41-year-old man, famed for directing Westerns, produced one of the most unique and artistic films in the history of American moviemaking, a film that would be […]

A year before creating their beloved The Third Man director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene collaborated for the first time on an adaptation of Greene’s short story “The Basement Room.” The result was The Fallen Idol, a minor masterpiece that made quite a splash on its release before plunging into oblivion along with the […]

Author’s note: this review was originally submitted to and rejected by a certain alt-weekly of my community. If it seems like it lacks the editorial joie de vivre of my customary work, that is doubtlessly why. The most apparent reason for Steven Soderbergh’s moderately confusing The Good German to exist is that of style, a […]

Never tried to hide the fact that film noir is probably my favorite genre, ever. Three reasons: the first is its unrelenting nihilism; the second is the quality of visual narrative (and just how damn beautiful a good noir looks); the third is the wit of the characters and dialogue. Okay, “wit” maybe overselling it, […]