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In all the decades I've been going to New York City I've never been mugged once. I had a friend who was mugged within five minutes of getting off the bus his first time in the city. The thing is, I'm sure it never ruined his experience of New York. Quite the opposite – I think being the victim of a crime scarcely a block from Times Square added to his sense of the place, both as reality and myth. I wouldn't be surprised if he felt sorry for me, missing out on New York crime in the perfect location....

There's a temptation once you've started sorting anything into a genre to start making lists, of the most typical, the most essential, or simply the best. Film noir, a genre whose tangled roots begin somewhere in the early '40s and ends – by general critical acclaim, though your mileage may vary – with Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil in 1958, begs for these kinds of rankings, if only because its hardboiled subject matter tends to attract a male fandom, and everybody knows how much men love lists. If you were making a list of most typical noir films, you'd...

Two fishermen pick up a psychopathic escaped convict who tells them that he intends to murder them when the ride is over.

Martha Stewart, the actress and singer best known for her supporting turns opposite Joan Crawford in Daisy Kenyon and alongside Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place, has died. She was 98. Stewart died Wednesday, her daughter Colleen Shelley reported on Twitter. "The original Martha Stewart left us yesterday," she wrote. "She had a new part to play in a movie with all her heavenly friends. She went off peacefully surrounded by her family and cat." In original Broadway musicals, Stewart appeared in 1946-47 in Park Avenue, written by George S. Kaufman and Nunnally Johnson, and was a replacement for...

Dismissed by some critics as a needless origin story, HBO's 'Perry Mason' reboot is exactly the type of high-minded storytelling we need today. This article contains spoilers. The man from the country has not expected such difficulties: the law should always be accessible for everyone, he thinks, but as he now looks more closely at the gatekeeper in his fur coat, his large pointed nose and his long, thin, black Tartar’s beard, he decides that it would be better to wait until he gets permission to go inside. — Franz Kafka, “Before The Law” Franz Kafka hated the draconian bureaucracies...

"What we’re doing is a means to an end. Now you agree with the end, don’t you? Well then you must agree with the means. You can’t have one without the other." Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) is the story of a mentally unstable woman (played by Kim Stanley) who believes that she communicates with the dead. Her hubris demands that she control and improve her fate, so she turns to crime as a means of satisfying her goals. Myra’s plan, which she believes is the idea of her dead child, Arthur, is worked out matter-of-factly to the...

Criterion Collection President Peter Becker knew FilmStruck’s death was imminent, weeks in advance of news reports late last October. And long before industry luminaries ranging from Martin Scorsese to Bill Hader sent up flares to save the Turner Classic Movies streaming platform, Becker and his peers had a contingency plan to save FilmStruck’s Criterion Channel.

By:Ray Olson | January 09, 2015 One responder to my previous post, “Notes on noir”, asked why so many movies are called film noir when, by my lights, they’re not. The simple, somewhat cheeky answer is “brand creep”: film noir is a bankable label for a crime movie, so it’s come to be liberally applied. More to the point is that professional film critics by and large don’t use as restrictive a definition of noir—viz., that the form tells stories “about little guys and gals getting a raw deal in a world that never gives them an even chance”—as mine,...

Our second feature tonight is a unlikely little gem of a film noir. Made for as little as $30,000 and shot in just six days, Detour had no budget, no stars, and no time to fix mistakes. Yet somehow, the final product turned out to be a haunting, memorable noir that is now considered to be a classic of the genre. Starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage.

Edmond O'Brien is a dead man walking in this great film noir of a doomed man determined to find who has plotted his demise and why...

It's double feature night at the DfB Theater, and boy. is our second movie a good one! A loner known only as The Swede (Burt Lancaster) is murdered by a pair of mysterious out-of-towners. An obsessed insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien), tasked with the simple matter of settling The Swede's life insurance policy, becomes obsessed with finding out just who he was, and why somebody wanted him dead.

Nick Bianco (Victor Mature) is a soft-hearted crook who wants nothing more than to put his criminal past behind him and return to his family. That's not always as easy as it seems, however, especially when it means crossing a giggling psychopath like Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark, who gives us one of the most memorable/infamous scenes in film noir history). Colleen Gray co-stars.

Momma always told you not to pick up hitchhikers, and this movie explains why. Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy make the mistake of giving the wrong guy (William Talman) a lift, and their lives quickly become a nightmare. Loosely based on the story of real-life spree killer Billy Cook. Directed by Ida Lupino.

This week's movie is a superb film noir directed by Fritz Lang and starring Edward G. Robinson. Robinson is a middle-aged, straight-arrow professor whose momentary lapse in judgment draws him into a web of deceit, murder, and coverup. Co-starring Joan Bennett, Raymond Massey, and Dan Duryea.

Excellent 1946 Thriller/Noir featuring Edward G. Robinson as a Nazi hunter whose investigations bring him to a small town in Connecticut. Orson Welles directs, and co-stars along with Loretta Young and a young Richard Long...