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

The Mysterians: Yankee go home?
Japanese Mysterians film likely carried an anti-imperialist, anti-American message under standard SF cliches of the era.
Peter Strempel’s essays on cinema, and film reviews.
Japanese Mysterians film likely carried an anti-imperialist, anti-American message under standard SF cliches of the era.
Stuart Heisler’s screen adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s The Glass Key gives us a character study of the noir anti-hero as descended from Eve and the original sin.
Edward Dmytryk’s 1947 Crossfire courageously attacks the bigotry of antisemitism and, more subtly, homophobia, on a shoestring budget but with outstanding performances.
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) is not quite the unsurpassed masterpiece often claimed, but it is nevertheless a considerable cinematic achievement.
Laura (1944) is an entertaining murder mystery melodrama, highly acclaimed in its own time, but not really a film noir as uncritically and widely claimed today.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound remains captivating, though contexts have changed for genres, subject, and artistic treatment.
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.
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