Fear City (1984)

I was hooked on Fear City’s (1984) opening credits with its lurid red-coloured titles, New York neon, and strip club montage, all pumping to Joe Delia and David Johansen’s song ‘New York Doll.’ Abel Ferrara directed this film, which feels like a 1940s film noir melodrama but coated in Times Square Eighties Sleaze. Filtering the […]

Light Sleeper (1992)

Is the definition of an auteur just making the same movie over and over again? To follow the recurring symbols and themes across the decades and to see someone keep returning to their obsessions. For director-writer Paul Schrader, he’s returned to a certain archetype – the ‘God’s Lonely Man’ – from his script to Taxi […]

The Late Show (1977)

Not to be confused with either David Letterman or The D-Generation, The Late Show (1977) is another entry in the seventies era’s love of film noir. Produced by Robert Altman, director-writer Robert Benton goes for a different take rather than Altman’s own deconstructive The Long Goodbye. There’s more of a classic witty vibe of detective […]

Duelle (1976)

Browsing through the library feature of Mubi, I stumbled across Duelle (1976; Duelle (une quarantaine), directed by Jacques Rivette, and I was drawn in by the plot summary describing a battle between the Daughter Of The Moon (Juliet Berto) and the Daughter Of The Sun (Bulle Ogier). A fantasy battle is embedded in noir styled […]

The Long Goodbye (1973)

American cinema in the 1970s had an interest in reviving older genres, and film noir was a great way of expressing society’s disillusionment and paranoia. Casting the hangdog, bemused charm of Elliott Gould as the classic detective character of Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye (1973) must have seemed like a joke to fans of […]