(This essay was originally posted on my former blog one year ago.) The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps, circa 2000 My band friends will be familiar with thi...

After four Noirvembers, four Noir City DC, and three Noir City San Francisco festivals, and countless movies and books about them, I still am fascinated with...

As I mentioned in my last post, the 1990s and 2000s tend to get the short shrift in my movie-watching schedules, so this list will be even shorter than my 19...

The 1990s remain my least-explored decade, partly due to so many life issues happening at the time (graduate school, getting married, finding a job, etc.). A...

Even though I started college in 1980 and finished in 1985 (and took at least one course every summer), I still managed to watch a ton of movies during that ...

Hold the Dark (2018) Directed by Jeremy Saulnier Written by Macon Blair Produced by Russell Ackerman, Eva Maria Daniels, Neil Kopp, Anish Savjani, John Schoe...

After the 1940s, the 1970s is my favorite decade for movies, although you probably wouldn’t know it from this list, one of the shortest in my 2018 Discoverie...

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) Written and directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen Produced by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, Megan Ellison, Sue Naegle, Robert Graf C...

I was somewhat surprised to find so many movies from the 1960s on my Best Discoveries of the Year list, a total of 15, matched only by my total from the 1940...

If you removed all the Westerns from the 1950s films I saw in 2018, I’d have a much smaller list. The appearance of so many Westerns is due largely to my int...

Early cinema has always been a mostly unexplored land mass for me, but I'm working on it. Thanks to a couple of friends who've made some excellent recommenda...

Noirvember 2018 ends today and while it was a good one, it was also bittersweet. My focus for this year’s event was both British noir titles and lesser-known...

The Lady Gambles (1949) Directed by Michael Gordon Produced by Michael Kraike Written by Halstead Welles Screenplay by Roy Huggins Story by Lewis Meltzer, Os...

House Across the Lake (aka Heat Wave) (1954) Directed by Ken Hughes Produced by Anthony Hinds Written by Ken Hughes Cinematography by Walter J. Harvey Hammer...

The Counterfeit Plan (1957) Directed by Montgomery Tully Produced by Alec C. Snowden, Richard Gordon Written by James Eastwood Cinematography by Phil Grindro...

The Chase (1946) Directed by Arthur Ripley Produced by Seymour Nebenzal Screenplay by Philip Yordan Based on the novel The Black Path of Fear by Cornell Wool...

Offbeat (aka The Devil Inside in the U.S.) (1961) Directed by Cliff Owen Produced by E.M. Smedley-Aston Written by Peter Barnes Cinematography by Geoffrey Fa...

The Castle of Sand (1974) Directed by Yoshitarō Nomura Produced by Shinobu Hashimoto, Yoshihara Mishima, Masayuki Sato Written by Seicho Matsumoto (based on ...

Bang! You’re Dead (aka Game of Danger) (1954) Directed and produced by Lance Comfort Written by Ernest Borneman, Guy Elmes Cinematography by Brendan J. Staff...

The Man I Love (1946) Directed by Raoul Walsh Produced by Arnold Albert Screenplay by W.R. Burnett, Catherine Turney Based on the novel Night Shift by Maritt...