Near-perfect murder mystery, from a novel by the poet Kenneth Fearing, about a Big Town crime reporter, overdue for vacation, following a killer's trail that seems to lead straight to himself. Classically compressed in time and space (two of the three "unities"), and the action (the third) is ushered along …
Frederick Knott's theatrical thriller, forever a staple of provincial playhouses, comes to the screen under the aegis of Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious). Its cinematization, however, depends not so much on any overt attacks on its staginess and talkiness as on the simple imposition of 3-D; and not so much on any …
Frederick Knott's theatrical thriller, forever a staple of provincial playhouses, comes to the screen under the aegis of Alfred Hitchcock (Notorious). Its cinematization, however, depends not so much on any overt attacks on its staginess and talkiness as on the simple imposition of 3-D; and not so much on any …
Yet another of Jean-Pierre Melville's hommages to the American gangster genre. There is, as always, an ever-present element of playacting about it -- these European actors in their I-Am-a-Hoodlum uniforms -- but the "play" maintains a childlike seriousness and unselfconsciousness and freedom from irony. And if the modern-day moviegoer should …
Wartime espionage thriller, from a Graham Greene novel, with a pervasive air of paranoia (director Fritz Lang had gotten out of Nazi Germany, but not out of its shadow), many atmospheric scenes (plenty of the director's trademark cigarette smoke), and a marvelous climactic moment that employs a pinprick of light …
Living the life of a Franciscan monk and devoting all his energy and legal know-how to the fight against slum landlords, Oliver Barrett IV reluctantly takes out his ice skates one day on the advice of his psychiatrist, and in the middle of Central Park his slumbering sexual curiosity is …
In the 1960s, the road to a paycheck for most superstar remnants of Hollywood’s Golden Age forked in two directions: big screen fright or the even more terrifying network drama. Ray Milland would go on to appear in an abundance of schlock horror titles (Frogs, The Thing With Two Heads, …