The Death of FilmStruck and What We Can Do About It

Follow the link provided below to read about the demise of FilmStruck and one filmlover’s response. -BNoir

Journeys in Darkness and Light

FilmStruck subscribers were given some devastating news this weekend: the service will no longer exist after November 29. You can read my reaction to this news here.

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Allotment Wives: for Kay Francis lovers

In The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir, founding noir critic Foster Hirsch opines that good noir is ruined when it becomes political and tries to bear a specific social message. Darkness, anxiety, corruption, crime, and inexorable fate are noir's territory,...

Pépé le Moko

The more I watch and study film noir, the deeper and more interesting the rabbit trail gets. There are so many loops and turns and connections to history, culture, politics, and artforms. I have been exploring the World War II...

Smash-Up…or Don’t

I came across Smash-up: The Story of a Woman (1947) while engaging in a combination of research on the Hollywood Blacklist and searching for new films to livetweet on Sunday evenings (via hashtag #BNoirDetour). To fill my HUAC research interests, I...

Ridin’ the Crime Wave with Gene Nelson

I had such an exciting ride with B noir Crime Wave (DeToth, 1953) the other night. And it wasn't the film itself that made for the exciting twists and turns!  (Frankly, I have to stop being surprised when I discover noir...

I Survived House of Bamboo (1955)

1950s noir varies wildly from profound to perfunctory to downright pitiful. As the post-WWII period became the Cold War era, noir focus shifted from the personal to the political, the ambiguous to the absolute, and from the antihero to the...

Discovering The Search (1948)

As a lover of 1940s film and the noir mood in many films throughout the decade, I want to talk about a non-noir film, The Search (1948). There are tangential noir connections, including mood and style. There is the darkness of the...

Hoodlum (1997)

I'm always looking for noirish films that address issues of gender and race, so when I was scrolling through "free to me" videos via cable, I was happy to find Hoodlum (1997), a picture I hadn't seen and don't even remember...

Race, Gender, and Bright (2017)

I finally got around to watching the hearty yet heartburn-inducing stew that is Bright (2017). I haven't yet decided the exact proportions of its recipe, but it definitely relies on servings of a number of past films and trends, including the...