Pather Panchali (1955)

The images in Pather Panchali (1955) directed by Satyajit Ray, have a quality like classic silent cinema – there’s something so luminescent and glowing about them, helped by the remastering and restoration of the film in 2015. A beautiful and quietly devastating movie, it focuses on a family living in rural Bengal during 1910. The […]

Elevator To The Gallows (1958)

Elevator to the Gallows (1958; Ascenseur pour l’echafaud) is a French film noir directed by Louis Malle that doesn’t waste any time, introducing its adulterous lovers – Julien (Maurice Ronet) and Florence (Jeanne Moreau) – on the phone in gorgeous close ups plotting the murder of her husband, his boss. Getting straight into this carefully […]

The Wages Of Fear (1953)

Tangerine Dream’s score for William Friedkin’s Sorcerer stuck in my head during. The original, The Wages Of Fear (1953; Le salaire de la peur), from my memory, generally keeps the music to the beginning and end, letting silence add a lot to the infamously gripping sequences of two trucks and four drivers transporting dangerous nitroglycerine […]

Night And The City (1950)

Directed by Jules Dassin and shot on location in London, Night And The City (1950) has the iconic look of the film noir genre down pat. From the chiaroscuro lighting of faces in close up to the placement of a suited individual against a dark cityscape, Max Greene’s cinematography is brilliant. The film is also […]

House On Haunted Hill (1959)

I received a 9-Movie boxset of Vincent Price movies one Christmas and slowly intend to work through them all. First, William Castle’s low budget hit House On Haunted Hill (1959) where a millionaire bets five strangers to stay the night in a haunted house for $10,000 each. This was a lot of fun. Even when […]