After ten years of working on Blancanieves, writer-director Pablo Berger must have had mixed feelings about the appearance of The Artist last year. That film’s runaway success was undeniably a useful ice-breaker, however, for they are similar beasts, modern silent films made (largely) according to the conventions and constraints of the 1920s. Berger even gives […]
Movies
Touch Of Noir: The End Of Film Noir And ‘Touch Of Evil’
Continuing the exploration of the outer limits of film noir I will now discuss one of the last examples of the genre with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). In the seventeen year period between 1941 and 1958, film noir had come to dominate Hollywood. Loosely based on the novel “Badge of Evil” by Whit […]
The Great Possibilities And Great Disappointment In Juan Solaris’ ‘Upside Down’
There is a great deal that can be inferred by writer-director Juan Solaris’ Upside Down, depending on the context in which you view the film. At the simplest level it is a love story about two people from different stations in life who desperately want to be together even though it is forbidden–a tale as […]
Touch Of Noir: The Outer Limits Of Film Noir With ‘The Maltese Falcon’
There are two films most often cited as the bookends, the outer limits of film noir: The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Touch of Evil (1958). By near consensus, John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon marks the beginning of the genre, and it will be the topic of Part I of this look at the boundaries of […]
Niels Arden Oplev’s ‘Dead Man Down’ Aspires To Something Greater
It’s hard not to commend Niels Arden Oplev’s Dead Man Down for some ambition, but at the same time, the failures contained therein make it insufferable at times.