Raymond Burr, | Schrodt. Director: A bystander observing a uniquely American phenomenon. Trivia aside, Ladd is stoic swagger as our hard-boiled protag Johnny, a recently discharged bomber pilot who, upon his return stateside to Hollywood, is accused of his cheating wife’s murder. Bradley discusses how the forces of collaboration and intuition inform her filmmaking process. I don’t know what co-producer and Janet’s then-boyfriend Jermaine Dupri thought he meant when he said he wanted 20 Y.O. At this point, any person who calls themselves a cinephile yet has not seen Carol Reed’s phenomenal Third Man needs to stop reading this blurb immediately, carve out two hours and rectify this mistake. Surrounded by side-splittingly listless chorus girls, also in half-ass blackface, and a bunch of adoring chorus boys who I hope were well-paid, Crawford goes through with this insanity as she did everything else, with completely oblivious chutzpah. Each new James Bond theme is almost as eagerly anticipated as the films themselves. Crime, Drama, Film-Noir. | Gross: The film reaches for pathos only to find tinsel instead. The earliest film in the series is Tod Browning’s still-potent silent horror classic The Unknown, in which a beautifully striking Crawford, then around 20, stars as a neurotic carnival girl who Lon Cheney’s circus freak is obsessed with marrying. | —A.C. The good horror film insists on the humanity that’s inextinguishable even by severe atrocity. Campillo is more upfront than Shyamalan—it’s more or less understood that the presence of the living dead in his film is likely metaphoric—and he actually seems willing to plumb the moral oblivion created by the collision of its two worlds. The filmmaker discusses how Shithouse reflects the specifics of a certain life experience. Stars: In fact, even now more than 15 years after its release, Croupier may be the best thing Owen has ever done, playing a struggling novelist who takes a job at a casino, looking for inspiration but finding mostly trouble. Yvonne De Carlo, The film is jarring, inventive and adventurous, and the payoff is every bit worth the mind-bending descent into madness. 97,401 Through a delicately woven tapestry of decades-old home videos shot by self-proclaimed “abolitionist” Fox Rich over the years while her husband, Robert, was in prison and more recent footage shot by Bradley and her crew, the film captures time in all of its contradictions. Pat Brown, The Asphalt Jungle could be understood as a hardening of John Huston’s directorial vision, breaking away from Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and any greater conquest of cool for pathetic men whose minds have gone rotten from being left on the slab for too long. —A.S. Stars: The story goes that Orson Welles was set to direct this spy thriller but other commitments precluded him from doing so, thus Norman Foster (Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, the Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan series, Woman on the Run) was brought on the production. Guadagnino uses Argento’s original as a launching pad for interrogating how the old, whether in dance or politics, often corrupts the new. “Bet you won’t click on this link and then email me,” read the tweet from college student Cooper Raiff to indie film maven Jay Duplass that began the journey of Shithouse. The roles were reversed, the world was upside down. 94 min The filmmaker also invests his narrative with references to classic horror films, most notably Psycho, though his own direction lacks Alfred Hitchcock’s polish, which in this case is a blessing. But the other thing I wanted to say is, yes, I think we should be looking out for each other, and I talk about that so much in Shithouse. —A.C. The grindcore “This Body” brings the fugly with surprising abandon, throwing hissing industrial clatter atop an admirably tuneless dirge (you hardly realize it’s a way-late bid in the chopped n’ screwed sweepstakes until the 16 RPM guest rap drops in). But the film’s impish wit and soft, Arcadian glow belie its cruel streak. Joseph Cotten, His love for her is entirely one-sided, so the return of Martha’s childhood friend Sam (Heflin) to town stirs up old secrets and older feelings—of jealousy for Walter, of guilt, regret, and tellingly, fear for Martha, who believes Sam also witnessed the murder. Jean-Luc Godard once said that “all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl,” and in noir, the latter was often the most dangerous. Cary Grant, Crow is best known for VH1-friendly rock, and her voice isn’t exactly sultry or powerful, qualities possessed by k.d. But he thinks, “Oh, everyone should be having this hard time, you just need me to help you out.” Where it’s like, “No, no, I don’t need you.” But then there’s like that whole thing where, yeah, you do. The film opens at night, as a bomb is placed in the trunk of a convertible just before an unwitting couple take a drive through town. Take it all back. Before The Matrix launched them into blockbuster superstardom, Andy and Larry (now Lana) Wachowski announced their arrival with this sleek, sexy neo-noir. | Director: This is an outlaw America, an apathetic postwar America where rules of propriety come a very distant third to getting one over on the other guy and feeding the rushing addiction of sleaze entertainment. 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Ed Gonzalez, Not unlike Matt Reeves’s American remake, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is, in its color scheme and emotional tenor, something almost unbearably blue. Jean Genet and Marisa don’t toast to their kids because they’re decent human beings fighting heterosexual patriarchy, but for being the “devilish bitch” and “dirty-mouthed trans” that they are. Robert Aldrich I’m blown away that such a central component of the film, Fox Rich’s personal video archives, weren’t baked in from the beginning. | If you’ve ever watched a single episode of Law and Order, or if you have a distinct fondness for procedural fare at large, then you really owe a debt of thanks to Dassin’s stripped-down work here. Newton’s a creepy hoot, and Dmytryk has such a good handle on his suspense that even the tonal dissonance of unwelcome comedy doesn’t break the film’s insidious spell. Charles Brabin It’s just understood that people are going through their exorcisms, and you leave them alone. The result is a staggering achievement in imagination that, like Blade Runner, flopped at the box office only to be revived later as a beloved cult classic. Stars: In an early, against-type turn, Gwyneth Paltrow is solid as a Reno cocktail waitress-slash-prostitute whom Reilly gets mixed up with, Samuel L. Jackson is typically good as the casino’s shady security guy, and Philip Seymour Hoffman—in a reportedly ad-libbed performance—makes the most of his limited screen time. An otherwise moral captain of a charter boat becomes financially strapped and is drawn into illegal activities in order to keep up payments on his boat. Which MCU Avengers Do Their Own Stunts (Which Never Risk It)? Jan Sterling, I hope people get that in order to take care of people and look out for each other, you have to first take care of yourself. Teresa Wright, —A.S. I don’t think of my writing as therapy in that way. © Beija Flor Filmes. Its characters were dirty, displaced, disillusioned, distrustful, just plain dumb. | Rumors that she made a few stag films before 1925 have never been verified, but sex was clearly the weapon that Crawford used to pull herself out of the gutter she came from. Coleen Gray, Kirk Douglas, The Best and Scariest Psychological Thrillers of All Time. Alida Valli, Even lesser Preminger is worth your time, though, particularly when he’s as laser-focused as he is here. —Dom Sinacola, Director: Jean-Pierre Melville Year: 1967. I think, at the end of day, I could’ve gotten permission, but I didn’t have the time to ask. Because it was really at a point in the editorial process where we were just working off of instinct and emotion. Endfield makes the case for his guilt, but through the complex worldview of noir he’s able to critique the lack of cultural empathy (alongside socially irresponsible journalism) that ushers him toward a downfall disproportionate to his crime. Edmond O'Brien, —A.C. Film noir filmmakers were also masters of skirting the Hays Code (censorship in the name of decency) through the use of implication, subtext, and suggestive dialogue in their film noir classics. | Gross: And depending on who we are and how we’re moving through space, that can become oppressively clear or something that one has the privilege to forget. A more interesting question: Why do we flock to films that revel in what is, in all likelihood, our greatest fear? International directors like Fritz Lang, Michael Curtiz, and Robert Siodmak, who’d honed the dramatic visuals of German Expressionism, fled their war-torn homes for the plentiful opportunities in Tinseltown. These explorations expand the meaning of their thematic subjects by injecting Bradley’s deeply intentional imagery into the conversation. | Gross: Chris’s changing behaviors, which include chillingly crawling on the floor of his room like an animal and eating a large spider, are rooted in the distance that comes between Sarah and Chris after they leave Sarah’s abusive husband. Myself and Gabe Rhodes, who edited the film, as we were talking through a lot of that, I found myself feeling that to really explain it was also then to try to explain racism in America. Fritz Lang Director: Nicolas Winding Refn Year: 2011. That’s all the setup that co-writers/directors David Moreau and Xavier Palud need to dredge up some uniquely discomfiting chills. Blaxploitation, now responsible for whole forests’ worth of thesis papers, carries a dual appeal: Films that fall within the genre’s framework often have an insoluble blackness that white audiences can never completely absorb, which, paradoxically, is part of their appeal. And so when we think about obligations around certain forms of explanation, or sort of a literal proof of an explanation of the why, it can also be coded language. As fun as Alice Júnior can be, it’s at its core a typical Brazilian kids’ movie, in the vein of on-the-nose fare about enjoying life but not doing drugs that Brazilian megastar Xuxa put out in the 1980s and ‘90s, except queered by its trans protagonist and the visual language of the times. There’s a life lesson in there about greed, but you might be too caught up in the film’s sweaty, grimy sheen for it to sink in. Croupier is a movie attracted to the sleazier side of life, and Owen’s antihero was the perfect tour guide. A one-stop shop for all things video games. Directors: The film, directed by Carol Reed, follows a man who travels to Vienna to accept a job from his old friend, Harry Lime. Her entry into the film is iconic: Garfield’s Frank is meant to be watching a hamburger on the griddle, but he’s distracted when a lipstick pen rolls across the floor to him. | If you’re of the impression that Quentin Tarantino invented the concept of a nonlinear crime story involving boxers and hitmen, Robert Siodmak’s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s celebrated short story is a must-watch.