In addition to being one of the most revolutionary authors of his generation, Paul Auster showed incredible prowess in his scarce but brilliant endeavours into filmmaking. Somehow both a guiding force and disciple of independent cinema, Auster was behind some of the most intriguing works of low-budget filmmaking of the 1990s, particularly in his collaborations…
Category: noir
Marlowe (2023)
Certain ideas for films tend to be best kept hypothetical, for a number of reasons. Whether it be that many of them work better in theory than they do in practice, or that it is sometimes impossible to live up to the impossibly high expectations that are packaged with some very ambitious concepts, we occasionally…
The Late Show (1977)
In 1973, Robert Altman directed The Long Goodbye, which was a contemporisation of Raymond Chandler’s novel that once again followed the exploits of Phillip Marlowe as he makes his way through a nightmarish version of Los Angeles. Beyond being a terrific film in and of itself, it was also a watershed moment for a genre…
Chinatown (1974)
“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” – these five words may seem simple, but they’re essentially the foundation on which the entire New Hollywood movement rests, specifically because they’re the last words we hear before Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic droning score accompanies us through the concluding moment of one of the defining works of cinema produced at…
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
John Huston was a director whose career lasted so long and stretched across multiple different generations that even suggesting that he was at some point a newcomer seems quite absurd, since he is undeniably an institution on his own, someone whose work stretched from the classical era to the period of New Hollywood and beyond….
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
While there was never an era where Hitchcock wasn’t producing work of an incredibly high standard (with the exception of a couple of less-successful works peppered between masterpieces), his later career was defined by his status as a master of his craft, which established him as one of the most important filmmakers of his generation,…
The Big Sleep (1946)
The sight of two shadowy figures in a room lit only by the dim glow of a desk lamp and the tips of their cigarettes – there are few images more memorable than this one, to the point where the entire film noir genre has been centred around such ideas (amongst others). The reason we’re…
Dark Passage (1947)
The 1940s were inarguably the peak of film noir – the 1930s featured several thrillers that laid the groundwork, while the 1950s were all about experimenting with form and content, continuously searching for new ways to explore the genre and represent its many fascinating conventions. Squarely in the middle of these two eras was one…
Railroaded! (1947)
One of the wonderful by-products of early film noir and gangster storytelling is that the viewer learns an abundance of new terms and concepts that may have gone out of fashion, but remain eternal, preserved in the cinema that was designed to entertain audiences of yesteryear, but have somehow managed to remain relevant until the…
Nightmare Alley (1947)
At its peak, film noir was one of the most popular genres – whether extracted from the wildly entertaining pages of pulp fiction novels that were consumed at a rapid pace by readers of all ages, or more high-concept, experimental works that saw various filmmakers taking on more original ideas, these films were extremely popular,…
The Postmodern Pelican 