A mantra that I hold very dear is that if a film can’t be good, the next best thing is for it to be camp. This certainly is a good starting point for The Woman in the Window, which is the kind of pulpy, trashy thriller that peaked in the early 1990s, and rarely managed…
Category: thriller
Paradise Now (2004)
Unfortunately, Paradise Now (Arabic: الجنّة الآن) hasn’t aged particularly well, despite being something of a sensation at the time of its release. Perhaps it’s the fact that it courted more controversy than was to be anticipated, or that the film isn’t always free of some glaring flaws the distract from an otherwise compelling story. Yet,…
Behind the Mask (1932)
The Pre-Code era was a time when Hollywood genuinely believed that you could make a film about a police officer going undercover to investigate an illegal drug ring by putting a moustache and hat on him and convincing everyone around him that he is a different person. Yet, this kind of flawed logic is more…
A Flower in Hell (1958)
In recent years, Korean cinema has exploded into the mainstream, with audiences all around the world starting to pay attention to the work being produced in the tiny nation, particularly since many of these filmmakers tell stories that we can’t necessarily find elsewhere. The global obsession with the country’s cinematic output extends for around the…
Vertigo (1958)
Most of the time, I tend to avoid discussing situations where a film has achieved the status of being considered one of the greatest of all times, because it would normally come down to reiterating many of the same points that others have made about why this particular work deserves the title, or it will…
Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)
Johnny Triton (Edward G. Robinson) has earned a living as a marginally famous mentalist, performing to mildly-amused nightclub crowds, who marvel at his supposed skillfulness at telling their future, which he does through logic and educated guessing. However, he has recently come to discover that he is indeed able to get visions of the future,…
Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
At the perfect intersection between film noir and melodrama exists a film that has somehow come to be definitive of both of them, and perhaps even more, of an entire era of filmmaking in general. Leave Her to Heaven is a strange case of a film – directed by John M. Stahl, one of the…
The Burnt Orange Heresy (2020)
Somewhere in the picturesque region of Lake Como stands an impressive mansion, to which art critic and writer James Figueras (Claes Bang) has been summoned to meet with the rambunctious Joseph Cassidy (Sir Mick Jagger), a world-renowned art dealer and collector who has a reputation for wanting only the finest works in his expansive collection….
Cairo Station (1958)
“The train is about to leave” Something that is both a blessing and curse when looking at art produced by groups that are sorely under-represented in the media is that the canon from which we draw the most significant works is much smaller, so it’s easier to find the masterpieces without having to sift through…
I Care a Lot (2021)
Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike) has certainly built quite an empire for herself, and amassed a level of comfortable wealth of which many would normally be nothing but envious. However, her procedure for reaching this point are far from conventional, since she is in a line of work that allows her the freedom to secretly assert…