Peter Strempel’s essays on cinema, and film reviews.

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 essays on cinema, and film reviews.
Not the noir some claim, but an outstanding hybrid with a powerful performance from Ladd and impressive mises en scène.
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.
Fight Club is not quite the celebration of toxic masculinity and anarchic revolt often assumed.
Scorsese and the cast of The Irishman say farewell to each other and an entire era of gangster films.
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.
How Hannibal Lecter became so much part of our culture that we are not even shocked by his crimes anymore.
Brilliant, arresting, insightful, the Burns-Novick documentary is a masterpiece of propaganda not entirely negatively defined.
The second part of my commentary on the arresting, brilliant Burns-Novick documentary.
The third part of my commentary on the arresting, brilliant Burns-Novick documentary.
The fourth and final part of my commentary on the arresting, brilliant Burns-Novick documentary, The Vietnam War.
Dark Passage is an extended metaphor for the anti-communist witch-hunting in the USA during the 1940s and ’50s.
Deadly Affair is a prurient adaptation of John Le Carre’s first novel, Call for the Dead.
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