Making a sequel to The Exorcist was always going to be a tough ask. The images in William Friedkin’s original film were so stark and singular, and yet so close to being [...]

Of all the bizarre genre fusions that emerged in the early 90s, Harold Becker’s Malice is perhaps the most contorted, convoluted and improbable in its sheer proliferation [...]

Julie & Julia was the third part of Nora Ephron’s remote romance trilogy. In Sleepless in Seattle, the two leads connected across the country through talkback radio. In [...]

Broadcast News was probably the most ambitious American film about newsrooms since Network – or at least that’s how it was billed. Yet this is one of the strangest [...]

Edge of the City was Martin Ritt’s remarkably assured directorial debut. Beautifully poised and paced, it’s one of the most mystically homoerotic films of the 1950s, [...]

One of the great revisionist westerns, at eighty minutes Bad Day at Black Rock retains all the economy and brevity of the short story it was based on – Howard Breslin’s [...]

There’s no noir quite like Murder by Contract – partly because Murder by Contract is not quite noir anymore, despite exhibiting some of the residual traits of 40s and 50s [...]

While Fritz Lang would direct into the 1960s, he released his last two film noirs in 1956 – While the City Sleeps, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. Of those two, While the [...]

The B-noirs of the 1940s often had a complicated relation to misogyny and femininity. On the one hand, these films produced spectacle by devising ever more ingenious and [...]