Peter Strempel’s reviews of film, TV, literature, and other cultural artifacts.

This Gun for Hire (1942)
Not the noir some claim, but an outstanding hybrid with a powerful performance from Ladd and impressive mises en scène.
Peter Strempel’s reviews of film, TV, literature, and other cultural artifacts.
Not the noir some claim, but an outstanding hybrid with a powerful performance from Ladd and impressive mises en scène.
The recent emergence of furtive and overt neo-fascism in some Western nations gives this film new meaning and power.
A landmark Australian film made relevant afresh as we consider contemporary war crimes.
This is Ridley Scott’s most significant film, deserving a re-evaluation after the disaster that was the studio edit.
There’s a rare chemistry in the first few seasons of Ray Donovan that makes the series transcend its more mundane, soap opera storylines.
Fight Club is not quite the celebration of toxic masculinity and anarchic revolt often assumed.
If I were pushed to nominate the best television fiction ever made, it would likely be the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of John le Carré’s 1974 novel, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Scorsese and the cast of The Irishman say farewell to each other and an entire era of gangster films.
Does Ellroy’s This Storm prove he’s past his brilliant and manic prime? Or just that his editors gave him too much leeway?
Von Donnersmarck explores the effect of tyranny on truth and beauty with some surprising conclusions.
Not among Caine’s top ten, but Forth Protocol was nevertheless more entertaining than most contemporary dross.
Mickey Rourke was pedestrian in Prayer for the Dying, but this Jack Higgins story about an IRA assassin resonates with my past.
In Perfidia we see a more mature James Ellroy, for the first time passing political judgement on his own society.
In the Hopkins trilogy, James Ellroy bled for his characters, the way Hemingway talked of it, even if it isn’t his best work yet.
How Hannibal Lecter became so much part of our culture that we are not even shocked by his crimes anymore.
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