The Stranger (1946)

The Orson Welles film, The Stranger (1946), which he directed and starred in, has always been around. Without a copyright holder, it’s long been in the public domain, and has shown up on public access TV, cheap DVDs, different streaming sites, and uploaded on YouTube. Held up as a classic film noir, the first that […]

Crime Wave (1954)

I first heard about Crime Wave (1954; also known as The City Is Dark), a B-movie film noir directed by Andre DeToth (Day Of The Outlaw) from Patton Oswalt’s appearance on the Pure Cinema Podcast. Oswalt talked about how shooting on location, as Crime Wave does, was more in keeping with how low budget B […]

Sharky’s Machine (1981)

Sharky’s Machine (1981) has a great opening sequence of Burt Reynolds looking gruff, striding through fog on a train track to the sounds of Randy Crawford’s ‘Street Life’ (later used on the soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown). Directed by Reynolds himself, this is adapted from a William Diehl novel and works as a 1980s […]

Fallen Angels (1995)

I hadn’t seen Wong Kar-Wai’s Fallen Angels (1995), I don’t think, since seeing it on SBS as a teenager. I loved it then, but only seemed to remember the opening section with the cool hitman (Leon Lai) wielding two hand guns, like an arty version of a Hong Kong action movie, and his handler (Michelle […]

Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018)

All I knew about the Chinese film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018; the title is appropriated from Eugene O’Neill’s play but has nothing to do with it) was that it had an unbroken shot that went for like an hour (59 minutes to be precise; basically the second half of the movie) and that […]