Narrow Margin (1990)

Gene Hackman’s presence as a thinking man action star occupied video store shelf space in the 1980s with stuff like The Package, Bat 21 and Company Business. Pre-Tom Clancy, Cold War era, Dad movies utilising Hackman’s trademark quality; an affable chuckle that could snap into authoritarian rage. For the film noir remake, Narrow Margin (1990), […]

The Missing Person (2009)

Michael Shannon and John Ventimiglia on the side of a dusty road talking for five minutes about what breed of dog Serpico had in the film Serpico is my idea of cinema, baby! That’s one scene from the neo-noir comedy-drama, The Missing Person (2009), which stars Michael Shannon as an alcoholic private eye named John […]

Point Blank (1967)

Lee Marvin in a series of dapper suits with a revolver in hand is enough for a 1960s neo-noir like Point Blank (1967) but the actor’s collaboration with young British director John Boorman offered them both a chance to push the crime genre into pop art experimentation. Revisiting Point Blank, it feels like Steven Soderbergh […]

The Dark Corner (1946)

Looking for an old-school film noir to watch, I took a recommendation that writer Angelica Jade Bastien wrote about, The Dark Corner (1946) released by 20th Century Fox and directed by Henry Hathaway. What caught my attention was that it starred Lucille Ball, and this was Lucille before The Lucy Show, from what I understand […]

The Black Cat (1934)

“It is better to be frightened… than to be crushed.” So says Bela Lugosi in The Black Cat (1934) after saving a woman from falling luggage – he plays the role of Dr. Vitus Werdegast, a Hungarian psychatrist returning to his homeland after spending more than a decade in a Siberian prison camp during WWI. […]