The Big Heat (1953)

I don’t know my film history but is The Big Heat (1953) the first movie where a cop is asked to hand in their badge and gun? Before they embark on a personal quest for revenge against an unjust system? It certainly feels like it. All I knew about The Big Heat was the infamous […]

Johnny Handsome (1989)

I’m a fan of Walter Hill and was in the mood for one of his neo-noir action thrillers. I once had an ex-rental VHS copy of Johnny Handsome (1989) that was my first viewing long ago and my memory was that it was a three star movie – good but maybe not essential. I found […]

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 […]