Flicker Alley debuts two brand-new restorations this week with the DVD/Blu-ray combo release of Too Late for Tears (1949) and Woman on the Run (1950). Public domain victims whose copies have proliferated on YouTube and other sites, Flicker Alley shows why, at least in the case of Woman on the Run, what an assured thriller…
Out of all the on-screen teams the studio system created, none endures as strongly as the teaming of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The two made nine films together, and had a strong romantic relationship off-screen, and nearly every film they made is magic distilled in some form. Their first pairing put them would set…
The 1950s is easily the decade where the Western thrived. Captured in expansive CinemaScope, the Wild West never looked wilder. But with so many cowpokes roaming the range it was only a matter of time before the range turned in on itself. The year before he took teen rebellion to the mainstream with Rebel Without…
Oft-considered one of the greatest film noirs ever made, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle is a story about the perils of city life…with the added bonus of a jewel heist. John Huston’s story is a dark and twisty tale that isn’t so much about law and order, but the crimes people commit against each other. Newly…
Despite the ingrained conventions of film noir some films can leave you surprised. So it is with director Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential. What starts as a typical heist film becomes a story of duplicity between good guys and bad about the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we tell to spare others. Filled with a…
Peter Bogdanovich is a director in love with cinema itself, and that’s encapsulated best in his ode to the Golden Era, 1971’s The Last Picture Show. Outside of its reminiscences towards a way of life that may never have existed outside of an Andy Hardy movie, Bogdanovich deconstructs the American family, the small town, and…
Being on the brink of nuclear war is a niche our country has occupied as long as I’ve been alive. In the late ’70s though the concept felt all too real as nuclear warheads proliferated other countries and the Cold War lumbered to life. But with our eyes trained firmly across the ocean, a grander…
