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What would happen if Raymond Chandler and H.P. Lovecraft wrote a novel together? Comic series "Fatale" by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips offers an answer. Published from 2012 to 2014 across 24 issues at Image Comics, "Fatale" is named for the archetype every film noir needs: the femme fatale, the sultry knockout who wraps men around her fingers without a care for what happens to their twisted forms (phallic cigarette optional).

The center of "Fatale" is one such woman, named Josephine or simply Jo. Colorists David Stewart and Elizabeth Breitweiser give her blood red lips and hair as black as Ava Gardner. Is her raven hair the same shade as her heart? Not quite. You see, Jo simply can't help making men desire and chase after her — especially men who want her for an occult sacrifice. Brubaker and Phillips mostly cook their comics hardboiled, such as "Criminal" (soon to be a Prime Video...

Even if you have never seen “Chinatown” you are probably familiar with the celebrated final line “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” But did you know that the line almost didn’t make it to the screen?

Set in a drought-ridden 1937 Los Angeles, “Chinatown” stars Jack Nicholson as a J.J. Gittes, a former-cop-turned private-detective with a lot of demons, who works as a successful private eye specializing in a divorce cases. One day, a woman (Diane Ladd) shows up in his office proclaiming she’s Evelyn Mulwray and wants to hire him because she suspects that her husband, the Los Angeles Water Commissioner, is having an affair. When he’s murdered, Gittes finds himself embroiled in a wide-ranging conspiracy involving control of L.A.’s water lead by John Huston’s ruthless businessman Noah Cross, who happens to be Evelyn’s father. Entering the picture is the real Evelyn...

With Chinatown, Roman Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne fashioned a multifaceted morality play that spoke both to a specific (and enduring) history of violence and corruption in the City of Angels and to the disenchanted orphans of the Summer of Love. If the final line of the film has come to be recognized as one of the greatest in cinematic history, it’s because few others so succinctly addressed the tenor of their times—in this case, the downbeat, miasma-like mood exuded by 1970s New Hollywood cinema, a world-weary shrug of resignation.

Despite the film’s forgivably literal ending, Chinatown here is less destination than state of mind. It’s a place where the customs are alien, motivations always suspect, and the only thing you can depend on is that no good deed will go unpunished. A case in point is a key exchange between socialite Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) and private eye J.

Clockwise left to right: Get Out (Universal Pictures), This Is Spinal Tap (MGM Home Entertainment), That Thing You Do! (20th Century Studios), Lady Bird (A24)Graphic: The A.V. Club

It’s always neat when someone you’ve admired shows off a hidden talent that makes you see them in a different light.

Today we are featuring this lovely, high-contrast key art for a repertory screening of The Night of the Hunter in Toronto's iconic century-old Revue Cinema. It is very likely that the cinema played Charles Laughton's film back in 1955 upon its original release.  Designer and visual artist John Godfrey, who has been featured in these pages before, offers a dramatic, almost minimal, take on the film's most revered sequence, where the imperilled child protagonists narrowly escape by commandeering a small boat, and then gently float away in a very dreamlike or fairy tale journey. In his own words: "The thing that stood out the most to me was Stanley Cortez's dreamlike cinematography. Every shot was like a perfectly composed painting, painted with light in an intentional way,...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is so loaded with neurotic symbology that you can attach nearly any meaning to it, and that’s the source of its uneasy, primordial power. In 1955, it might’ve been logical to assume that Laughton and critic turned screenwriter James Agee, working from David Grubb’s novel, were intending the film as an allegory for McCarthyism. After all, the villain, Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), cannily exploits people’s panic in order to line his pockets, turning them on one another so as to distract them from the true evildoings being committed.

Like those in the grip of the second Red Scare, most of Harry’s victims are easily exploited because they willingly forfeit individual judgment in the presence of reassuringly unquestioned leadership. As in other McCarthyism parables (most obviously Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers), only the children and...

Home video label Vinegar Syndrome is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, and today brings along with it the launch of a brand new sub-label from the company.

Titled Vinegar Syndrome Labs (Vsl), the aim of the sub-label is to expand and defy expectations with the diversity of films the company restores and releases. The team explains, “As the name implies, Vsl will serve as a kind of testing area for releasing genres and eras of film that one might not immediately expect to come from Vs.

“The ultimate objective of Vsl will be to see if these types of films will find an audience, and if so, pursue and release more of them…and even if not, still serve as a means of restoring more of the weird, rare, and unusual movies you might not expect from Vinegar Syndrome.”

The first release from the new label, now available for pre-order,...

Nobody knew what to make of "Night of the Hunter" when it screened in 1955. Directed by actor Charles Laughton from a script by James Agee, it broke every rule in the book. It's a fairy tale that's nastier and more adult than anything Disney could produce. It's a black-and-white film made at a time when color movies were coming into vogue. Famous actor Robert Mitchum plays one of the scariest villains in film history. There's a stretch in the middle that swings into magical realism, and the end is a Christmas movie. "Night of the Hunter" was so hated by critics at its release that Laughton decided never to make another film. These days it's heralded as not just one of the greatest pictures of its era, but one so miraculous in its construction (despite its foibles) that it might as well be a UFO.

Many have lauded Charles Laughton as the film's guiding genius,...

The 1955 cult classic horror "The Night of the Hunter" may be one of the scariest films of all time, but not because of a well-timed jump-scare or dazzling practical effects. What is it that makes Charles Laughton's sole directorial credit so very terrifying? Robert Mitchum's performance as a Bible-thumping villain is enough to set your teeth on edge, but it's the haunting set design and Hilyard M. Brown and skillful camera work by Stanley Cortez that have always struck me to my core.

"The Night of the Hunter" was filmed at the tail end of Hollywood's golden era. Most of the major studios were running out of money in the mid-50s and early '60s, and there are tell-tale signs of budget cuts in a lot of films, a sort of canned quality. Cut costs meant that studios were forcing directors to put their huge sound stages...

"The Night of the Hunter" may hold back from showing any murders onscreen, but that doesn't make Reverend Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) any less creepy. A fanatical Christian that's equally misogynist, Powell roams the Great Depression Ohio valley, marrying widows before robbing them of both of their largesse and lives. The not-at-all-good reverend sees no conflict between his faith and his black widowing. After all, the Bible is full of killings.

While Powell is said to have a high body count, only two of his killings are directly featured in "The Night of the Hunter." The film opens with him fleeing from one, catching a glimpse of his victim's lifeless legs from her basement door. Powell then marries Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) to find money stolen and hidden away by her late husband. After brainwashing her into his faith, he disposes of her. She ends up being so robbed of...

There are fewer joys in filmmaking than successfully pulling off an ambitious movie trick. For example, in his sci-fi classic "The Thing," director John Carpenter hired a double-amputee actor to stand in during the famous defibrillation scene, convincing viewers that Richard Dysart's character had his arms bitten off. The CGI-averse Christopher Nolan similarly orchestrated the zero-gravity hallway fight in "Inception" via massive centrifuge-style rotating sets, earning the film a Best Visual Effects Oscar. But some of the most marvelous movie illusions didn't require elaborate constructions. In fact, one of the most exemplary images of classic cinema was nothing more than a trick of the eye.

Shamefully, "The Night of the Hunter" is Charles Laughton's only feature film as director due to its poor reception at the time. A noir thriller based on the novel of the same name by Davis Grubb, the 1955 movie is now widely considered a true classic.

Black Tuesday (1954).Hugo Fregonese’s best films are fueled by desperation, a clean and potent but highly flammable form of energy. Just as fight-or-flight adrenaline sharpens our senses and reflexes, his filmmaking reaches heights of rigor and intensity when his characters are in the tightest spots—locked up, on the run, or under siege. Often facing death, they are also sentenced for life to be themselves: fate in his films is not a capricious external force but an expression of character. As a pensive Jack the Ripper says in Man in the Attic (1953), “There are no criminals. There are only people doing what they must do because they are who they are.”But who was Hugo Fregonese? Watching his films, it is hard not to speculate on the link between their compulsive themes of escape and restless wandering and his own refusal or inability to settle down. Born in Argentina...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform. Stream “Night of the Hunter” here.

What’s left to say about “The Night of the Hunter,” beyond the brilliance of Charles Laughton’s direction, Robert Mitchum’s horrific and hypnotizing screen presence, and the timeless badassery of a shotgun-wielding Lillian Gish? How about this: If this masterpiece remains a blind spot for you, now’s the time to catch up, before the planned remake threatens to ruin its memory.

More from IndieWireAnother 'Hellraiser'? Yawn. Hollywood, Original Horror Movies Are Nothing to FearStream of the Day: 'Notes on a Scandal' Is a Campy Battle of the Divas

That may sound like a harsh assessment of a project that has yet to come to fruition, but the very notion that “The Night of the Hunter...

One of the best directorial debuts of all-time, as well as his sole helming effort, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is a masterpiece of mood and madness, giving Robert Mitchum perhaps the best role of his career as serial killer Reverend Harry Powell. Now, as Hollywood is known to do, they want to recapture the magic for a remake.

Matt Orton, who scripted the Oscar Isaac-led drama Operation Finale, will write a contemporary version of the story for Universal Pictures, Variety reports. There are no additional details yet, but it’s a curious proposition as the original film wasn’t a hit upon its release with critics nor audiences, something rightfully reconsidered as holds up perfectly to this day. Hopefully, Orton has quite a fresh take and the right actor can step into Mitchum’s shoes for this retelling.

Not counting the numerous directors merely influenced by the film,...

The only movie directed by Charles Laughton but he made it count. A brilliant mix of heavenly poetry and harrowing horror film, James Agee’s script, seemingly influenced by the New Testament and Jim Thompson, tells the story of a psychotic preacher (played by a terrifying Robert Mitchum) and his unstoppable hunt for some stolen loot. Lillian Gish and Stanley Cortez’s cinematography are the other high points of this perverse but tender thriller.

The post The Night of the Hunter appeared first on Trailers From Hell.

Were movie folk blind in 1960? We kids were so dino- crazy, Any movie about dinosaurs would have cleaned up at the box office. We’re told that Jack H. Harris didn’t do badly with his third turn at the wickets, despite thunder lizards with a complexion of Jurassic Pla-Doh. The Romper Room dramatics didn’t offend my eight-year-old sensibilities, either. The movie had a caveman for comic relief and a klutzy villain that all but eliminates himself, so kid-safe it is even if people are being devoured alive. And hardly any kissing scenes, Ma.

Dinosaurus!

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1960 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 83 min. / Street Date August 20, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Ward Ramsey, Paul Lukather, Kristina Hanson, Alan Roberts, Gregg Martell, Fred Engelberg, Wayne TreadwayLucita Blain.

Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Film Editor: John A. Bushelman

Original Music: Ronald Stein

Written by Dan E. Weisburd, Jean Yeaworth idea by Jack H.

In celebration of its 100th anniversary, the American Society of Cinematographers has released a list of the 100 best shot films of the 20th century.

This list was released to "showcase the best of cinematography as selected by professional cinematographers.” Here's how the list was put together:

The process of cultivating the 100 films began with Asc members each submitting 10 to 25 titles that were personally inspirational or perhaps changed the way they approached their craft. “I asked them — as cinematographers, members of the Asc, artists, filmmakers and people who love film and whose lives were shaped by films — to list the films that were most influential,” Fierberg explains. A master list was then complied, and members voted on what they considered to be the most essential 100 titles.

Here's a little sizzle reel that was cut together showcasing some of the films on the list:

It's hard to argue with the Top 10 films,...

Hollywood’s most tragic ‘mangled masterpiece’ gets a new lease on life with this special edition of what could have been Orson Welles’ greatest film, had Rko not intentionally destroyed it to sully the stature of the unlucky Boy Genius. The movie can’t be reconstructed but its reputation can be restored — the story of the demise of a powerful industrial family would have been a dramatic powerhouse, perhaps more impressive than Citizen Kane.

The Magnificent Ambersons

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 952

1942 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 88 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date November 27, 2018 / 39.95

Starring: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Anne Baxter, Tim Holt, Agnes Moorehead, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Richard Bennett.

Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Film Editor: Robert Wise

Original Music: Bernard Herrmann

From the novel by Booth Tarkington

Screenplay, Production and Direction by Orson Welles

Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons is probably the most mourned ‘lost’ title in American film history.

Mamie Van Doren Film Noir Collection

Blu ray

Kl Studio Classics

1957 – 1959 / 1.75:1, 1.85:1, / 216 Min. / Street Date – November 20, 2018

Starring Mamie Van Doren, Anne Bancroft, Lee Van Cleef, Lex Barker

Cinematography by Stanley Cortez, William Margulies

Directed by Howard Koch, Edward Cahn

Mamie Van Doren, née Joan Lucille Olander, was born in Rowena, South Dakota in 1931. In 1942 the family relocated to Hollywood where the camera-ready kid blossomed at the speed of light – a Pantages usherette at the age of 13, she racked up a string of attention-grabbing gigs that led to a reign as Miss Eight Ball and the inevitable merger with Tinseltown’s preeminent lounge lizard, Howard Hughes.

That arrangement generated a distinctly higher-profile for the industrious starlet – from an eye-popping Alberto Vargas pinup to swivel-hipped walk-ons in a series of forgettable potboilers and finally a contract at Universal. A cheeky studio exec christened her “Mamie” thereby hijacking the name of President...

Interviewing Charlie Saldana in the quiet of his North Hollywood home, the 79-year-old working key grip still exudes the cool confidence of someone who’s spent a lifetime in partnership with one of Hollywood’s great directors: Clint Eastwood.

Saldana still possesses an actor’s looks, with a salt-white mustache and a full silver mane. He began his career building scaffolding for Disney’s “Pollyanna” in 1960, following military service in the 101st Airborne Division. Joining the grip union, he was employed by Hollywood’s blossoming TV industry on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “Gomer Pyle, Usmc” “Hogan’s Heroes” and “The Mod Squad.” The neophyte grip learned his craft well.

Born in 1939 to Charles and Josephine Saldana, Charlie was raised with a strong work ethic that drove his rise in the industry. “Gaining grip skill was a layered, educative process,” he says.

Five years on the series “The Rookies” produced...

“Who could fail to sense the greatness of this art, in which the visible is the sign of the invisible?”—Jean GrémillonCinema is what you imagine, and what you imagine first, in the darkness where bundles of light thrown 24 times a second at a wall produce illusion, is movement, an electromagnetic record of the past conjured into motion by your mind’s eye. A vision. So cinema is alchemy, it’s mystery. Unlike television, which is ephemeral but endless, cinema is eternal yet ever ending. (Raúl Ruiz made an entire film from the short ends of another, and the studio system of Classic Hollywood was so dedicated to The End that it couldn’t go on.) Cinema is shadow, totality, the night.Not all film is cinema and not all cinema is poetry, but poetry in the movies is always cinema. And poetry is unknowable, like the films of Paul Clipson.

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter is an American classic. But it is also a clear descendant of a movement from across the Atlantic: German Expressionism. This comes through most clearly in the breathtaking work of cinematographer Stanley Cortez (The Magnificent Ambersons).

Yet while The Night of the Hunter’s visual language is clearly indebted to the German films of the 1920s, its sets are far cry from the angular nightmares of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and its siblings. Instead, the work of art director Hilyard M. Brown and set decorator Alfred E. Spencer is grounded in iconic American architecture. Through the intimate collaboration of production design and cinematographer, an Expressionist battle between good and evil unfolds through the aesthetic material of American life.

Hey, Ib Melchoir’s Opus Mars-us is back, in a not-bad new scan and color-grading job. If the nostalgia bug has bitten you deep enough to appreciate a fairly maladroit but frequently arresting space exploration melodrama, this may be the disc for you. Let’s be honest: Nobody can resist the allure of the fabulous Bat-Rat-Spider-Crab, and in glorious Cinemagic, no less.

The Angry Red Planet

Blu-ray

Scream Factory

1960 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 83 min. / Street Date June 27, 2017 / 17.28

Starring: Gerald Mohr, Nora Hayden, Les Tremayne, Jack Kruschen.

Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Film Editor: Ivan J. Hoffman

Original Music: Paul Dunlap

Written by Ib Melchior from a story by Sid Pink

Produced by Norman Maurer & Sid Pink

Directed by Ib Melchior

Unjust though it may be, not all Savant reviews make the national news feed, but my old 2001 coverage of the pretty miserable MGM DVD of The Angry Red Planet got quoted all over the place,...

'The Magnificent Ambersons': Directed by Orson Welles, and starring Tim Holt (pictured), Dolores Costello (in the background), Joseph Cotten, Anne Baxter, and Agnes Moorehead, this Academy Award-nominated adaptation of Booth Tarkington's novel earned Ricardo Cortez's brother Stanley Cortez an Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White. He lost to Joseph Ruttenberg for William Wyler's blockbuster 'Mrs. Miniver.' Two years later, Cortez – along with Lee Garmes – would win Oscar statuettes for their evocative black-and-white work on John Cromwell's homefront drama 'Since You Went Away,' starring Ricardo Cortez's 'Torch Singer' leading lady, Claudette Colbert. In all, Stanley Cortez would receive cinematography credit in more than 80 films, ranging from B fare such as 'The Lady in the Morgue' and the 1940 'Margie' to Fritz Lang's 'Secret Beyond the Door,' Charles Laughton's 'The Night of the Hunter,' and Nunnally Johnson's 'The Three Faces...

Ricardo Cortez biography 'The Magnificent Heel: The Life and Films of Ricardo Cortez' – Paramount's 'Latin Lover' threat to a recalcitrant Rudolph Valentino, and a sly, seductive Sam Spade in the original film adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon.' 'The Magnificent Heel: The Life and Films of Ricardo Cortez': Author Dan Van Neste remembers the silent era's 'Latin Lover' & the star of the original 'The Maltese Falcon' At odds with Famous Players-Lasky after the release of the 1922 critical and box office misfire The Young Rajah, Rudolph Valentino demands a fatter weekly paycheck and more control over his movie projects. The studio – a few years later to be reorganized under the name of its distribution arm, Paramount – balks. Valentino goes on a “one-man strike.” In 42nd Street-style, unknown 22-year-old Valentino look-alike contest winner Jacob Krantz of Manhattan steps in, shortly afterwards to become known worldwide as Latin Lover Ricardo Cortez of...

What’s the best true-story WW2 combat film for pure-grit, no-nonsense tanks ‘n’ bombs ‘n’ crazy mayhem action on a giant scale? This non-stop battle epic gets my vote. George Segal and Ben Gazzara’s infantry dogs are suitably tough, cynical and desperate, especially when they’re repeatedly sent into danger. The history is fairly accurate — there was indeed a race to seize the last bridge across the River Rhine.

The Bridge at Remagen

Blu-ray

Twilight Time

1969 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 117 min. / Street Date June 13, 2017 / Available from the Twilight Time Movies Store 29.95

Starring: George Segal, Robert Vaughn, Ben Gazzara, Bradford Dillman, E.G. Marshall, Peter Van Eyck, Hans Christian Blech, Bo Hopkins, Matt Clark, G&uunl;nter Meisner.

Cinematography: Stanley Cortez

Film Editors: William Cartwright, Harry Knapp, Marshall Neilan Jr.

Original Music: Elmer Bernstein

Written by Richard Yates, William Roberts, Roger Hirson

Produced by David L. Wolper

Directed by John Guillermin

Who...

Troubling fact: the great director Otto Preminger's worst film is not Skidoo. Three physical misfits form an alternative family as a defense against the world. It's a good idea for a movie, but the writer and director do just about everything wrong that a writer and director can do. Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon Blu-ray Olive Films 1970 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 113 min. / Street Date August 16, 2016 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.98 Starring Liza Minnelli, Ken Howard, Robert Moore, James Coco, Kay Thompson, Fred Williamson, Anne Revere, Pete Seeger, Pacific Gas & Electric, Ben Piazza, Emily Yancy, Leonard Frey, Clarice Taylor, Julie Bovasso, Barbara Logan, Nancy Marchand, Angelique Pettyjohn. Cinematography Boris Kaufman, Stanley Cortez Production Design Lyle R. Wheeler Charles Schramm Makeup effects Charles Schramm Film Editors Dean Ball, Henry Berman Original Music Philip Springer Written by Marjorie Kellogg from her novel Produced and Directed by Otto Preminger

Reviewed...

If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there will never be a definitive list of the greatest cinematography, but for our money, one of the finest polls has been recently conducted on the matter. Our friend Scout Tafoya polled over 60 critics on Fandor, including some of us here, and the results can be found in a fantastic video essay below. Rather than the various wordless supercuts that crowd Vimeo, Tafoya wrestles with his thoughts on cinematography as we see the beautiful images overlaid from the top 12 choices.

“I’ve been thinking of the world cinematographically since high school,” Scout says. “Sometime around tenth grade I started looking out windows, at crowds of my peers, at the girls I had crushes on, and imagining the best way to film them. Lowlight, mini-dv or 35mm? Curious and washed out like the way Emmanuel Lubezki shot Y Tu Mamá También,...

Special Mention: Shock Corridor

Written and directed by Samuel Fuller

USA, 1963

Genre: Psychological Thriller

Shock Corridor stars Peter Breck as Johnny Barrett, an ambitious reporter who wants to expose a killer hiding out at the local insane asylum. In order to solve the case, he must pretend to be insane so they have him committed. Once in the asylum, Barrett sets to work, interrogating the other patients and keeping a close eye on the staff. But it’s difficult to remain a sane man living in an insane place, and the closer Barrett gets to the truth, the closer he gets to insanity.

Shock Corridor is best described as an anti-establishment drama that at times is surprisingly quite funny despite the dark material. The film deals with some timely issues of the era, specifically the atom bomb, anti-communism, and racism. It features everything from a raving female love-crazed nympho ward,...

The Magnificent Ambersons

Landon’S Take:

Orson Welles is celebrated as one of the foremost visionaries in the history of American filmmaking. He’s also renowned as the perennial artist against the system. While both of these factors make Welles perhaps the ideal auteur – someone satisfied with nothing less than a perfect articulation of his individual vision within the collaborative medium of filmmaking – it also presents some unique problems in examining works that were taken away from him.

The classically celebrated auteurs of studio era Hollywood (e.g., Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock) were known for creating individuated worldviews across their body of work either despite or even because of the strictures inherent in Classical Hollywood filmmaking. This was not Welles, who from his rise to infamy with the 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast to his first studio feature made a name by challenging the assumed utilities of a medium. Neither could...

From Vci Entertainment comes the odd and only moderately interesting Silent Discoveries double feature, containing After Six Days, a 62-minute 1920 Biblical epic, and Yesterday and Today, a nearly hour-long 1953 documentary. As noted by Vci, the former was “Touted at the time as a ‘$3,000,000 Entertainment for the Hundred Millions,'” and this edition was made from the only complete copy known to exist, a mint 16mm print of the 1929 7-reel sound reissue. The second title here features actor, comedian, and famous vaudevillian George Jessel as he hosts a random assortment of clips from early silent film releases, most of which were, and are, rarely otherwise seen. Neither portion is particularly good, or even consistently entertaining, but both—and this is the reason the DVD is worthwhile—are unique and scarce, and are therefore significant entries into the growing library of archived films made available for mass consumption.

To start with After Six Days,...

Stumbling across that list of best-edited films yesterday had me assuming that there might be other nuggets like that out there, and sure enough, there is American Cinematographer's poll of the American Society of Cinematographers membership for the best-shot films ever, which I do recall hearing about at the time. But they did things a little differently. Basically, in 1998, cinematographers were asked for their top picks in two eras: films from 1894-1949 (or the dawn of cinema through the classic era), and then 1950-1997, for a top 50 in each case. Then they followed up 10 years later with another poll focused on the films between 1998 and 2008. Unlike the editors' list, though, ties run absolutely rampant here and allow for way more than 50 films in each era to be cited. I'd love to see what these lists would look like combined, however. I imagine "Citizen Kane," which was on top of the 1894-1949 list,...

News.

The Best-of-the-Year lists keep rolling in, so here's a batch of worthwhile entries unveiled in the past week: Film Comment - 50 Best Films | 20 Best Undistributed Films Indiewire - Critics Survey Glenn Kenny Scott Foundas Slant Magazine Michael Sicinski's "The Best of the Rest" Village Voice Film Poll The latest issue of Cineaste is on shelves now and includes, among other pieces, an article on rom-coms today by Adrian Martin, and a feature by David Sterritt on "Beats, Beatniks, and Beat Movies." Also make sure to look online for exclusive content from Aaron Cutler and Celluloid Liberation Front. Above: one of our favorite journals, La Furia Umana, is now shipping its fourth print edition, featuring multiple pieces on Nicholas Ray and Brian De Palma. The 18th online edition is due out by the end of the month, so we'll be checking up on Lfu again soon. On digital shelves is...

Stars: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Peter Graves | Written by James Agee | Directed by Charles Laughton

My love of movies comes from watching them, obsessively and probably way too much. No matter how many I manage to watch though, even starting from an early age I’ve still not seen some that are deemed as masterpieces and that annoys me. There are classics out there that deserve to be seen and I do have a list in my head of ones that I will see no matter what it takes and one of these was The Night of the Hunter. When I had the chance to review the Arrow release of the film on Blu-ray I jumped at the chance, there is no better way to see it other than on the big screen. Now having seen it I feel very lucky I did, not just for the movie...

(Charles Laughton, 1955; Arrow, 15)

One of the greatest, most influential directorial debuts in movie history, The Night of the Hunter was a major critical and commercial failure in 1955, and Charles Laughton never directed another film, which was bad for him, bad for us and bad for Norman Mailer, whose The Naked and the Dead was to be Laughton's follow-up project.

Based on Davis Grubb's gothic novel, it's a grim fairytale for adults set in poverty-stricken West Virginia during the depression and centres on a father going to the gallows for murder after concealing some stolen money in his little daughter's doll and swearing her brother to secrecy. An ogre in the form of a psychotic preacher (Robert Mitchum's best, most scary performance), who'd shared a cell with their father, is after the loot. When this monstrous figure of pure evil takes over the impoverished family, the children flee down the Ohio river,...

Director Charles Laughton’s and screenwriter James Agee’s adaptation of the novel The Night of the Hunter has become a reverently admired and extremely influential film in the 60 years since the ‘failure’ of its initial release. The film has placed very highly in many international critical polls, including Cahier du Cinema’s 2007 listing of the ‘100 Most Beautiful Films’, where it sits at #2. Many filmmakers have cited it as a key inspiration, and Steven Spielberg showed it to the crew of E.T. in order to help them understand the child’s perspective from which he wanted the film to be told. It was even re-made as a virtually unwatchable 1991 TV movie with Richard Chamberlain as Harry Powell, and a musical stage version was created in the late ‘90s for which a soundtrack CD is available.

Perhaps the most important indication of the esteem in which the film is now held...

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time for one reason: the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. Enjoy!

****

Special Mention:

Shock Corridor

Written and directed by Samuel Fuller

USA, 1963

Shock Corridor stars Peter Breck as Johnny Barrett, an ambitious reporter who wants to expose the killer at the local insane asylum. To solve the case, he must pretend to be insane so they have him committed. Once in the asylum,...

Last night I watched Orson Welles' 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons for the first time. Of course, like everyone else, I'm watching the edited down 88-minute version of the film, which was recently re-released by Warner Home Video along with the 70th anniversary release of Citizen Kane, but at this point you take what you get as it seems decided we'll never see the original 148-minute version. As David Kamp wrote in his 2002 Vanity Fair piece, Ambersons is considered one of the "two great 'lost' movies in the annals of Hollywood filmmaking" along with Erich von Stroheim's Greed, which Christopher Nolan recently pegged as a Criterion hopeful. I've had Kamp's piece bookmarked for the longest time, not wanting to read it before seeing the movie myself and I was finally able to do so. It's a fascinating story of how the film came to be an hour shorter than...

Throughout the month of October, Editor-in-Chief and resident Horror expert Ricky D, will be posting a list of his favorite Horror films of all time. The list will be posted in six parts. Click here to see every entry.

As with all lists, this is personal and nobody will agree with every choice – and if you do, that would be incredibly disturbing. It was almost impossible for me to rank them in order, but I tried and eventually gave up.

****

Special Mention:

Shock Corridor

Directed by Samuel Fuller

Written by Samuel Fuller

1963, USA

Shock Corridor stars Peter Breck as Johnny Barrett, an ambitious reporter who wants to expose the killer at the local insane asylum. In order to solve the case, he must pretend to be insane so they have him committed. Once in the asylum, Barrett sets to work, interrogating the other patients and keeping a close eye on the staff.

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Sept. 4, 2012

Price: DVD $24.95 each, Blu-ray $29.95 each

Studio: Olive Films

Olivia De Havilland doesn't like what she sees in The Dark Mirror.

The Dark Mirror (1946) and Secret Beyond the Door (1947), two classic film noir crime movies, make their DVD and Blu-ray debuts from Olive Films.

The Dark Mirror finds Olivia De Havilland ( Gone with the Wind) portraying twin sisters who are implicated in a Hollywood murder, while a police detective (Thomas Mitchell) must figure out if one or both were involved in the killing. As a psychiatrist approached by the detective to help with the complicated case, Lew Ayres agrees to see them separately and he’s immediately attracted to one of them and fears the other one to be killer. But he’s also worried that if he’s wrong he could end up on a slab in the morgue himself.

The movie features taut direction...

Is there such a thing as a perfect film? Perhaps. You could certainly argue that personal taste plays into the question of perfection too much -- one man's triumph is another's disaster. And even so, there are so many possible things that can go wrong with a film -- one duff performance, one ill-conceived shot, one poorly-written scene -- that it's almost an impossible task. But dammit if we don't consider "Chinatown" to be as close as you can get to being perfect.

Starting with a devilishly complex, yet brilliantly simple script from Robert Towne, still one of the finest ever written, it displays top class at every level, from Roman Polanski directing at his peak (in his last American film), to ace performances from Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and Walter Huston, to Jerry Goldsmith's all-time-great score. It's hard to ask for much more from a film. "Chinatown" was...

Many—maybe too many, looking at this bunch of bone-tired warriors of Av-virtue—were the travels the Ferroni Brigade embarked on all through 2011: oftentimes for festivals all over Europe, sometimes for visits to this archive or that as part of our programming arbeit (to be read with a Japanese drawl). During those months in the dark, we saw a lot—some of which chimed and rhymed with new works we encountered in this multiplex back home or that gallery abroad, on this collector's Steenbeck or in that producer's private projection room (they still exist).

On one of those trips, we were joined by our main Mubi-man, His Kasness a.k.a. the Kasest with whom we plunged one evening into a brainstorming on what The Festival would look and feel like (truth be told: it was more like a communal delirium—but what do you expect from folks sitting...

Peter Kimpton tops up our writers' favourite film series with an ode to Charles Laughton's 1955 thriller, a tale as dark and disquieting as a half-forgotten dream

Want to write your own review of the film? Do so here – or brave the cut-throat comments section below

Motionless for 90 minutes, I could not even remove my coat. I sweated and shivered. I felt in shock. Was the film recreating scenes from my sleep? I had never seen, as far as I can recall, The Night of the Hunter. That is until a cold, wintry night in the 1990s when, working in Glasgow, I went to the city's Gft cinema to catch a new 35mm print of Charles Laughton's 1955 masterpiece. It was his only film as a director. Critics panned it on its release, consequently killing off the actor's career behind the camera, and perhaps robbing history of further works of greatness.

Beginning a series looking at obscure pre-Code Hollywood films, made between the advent of sound and the strict enforcement of the Production Code. Some of these movies are rightly celebrated and frequently screened: Baby Face (1933), Red Headed Woman (1932), even to some extent Bed of Roses (1933). But others are trapped in copyright limbo or locked in vaults by studios too blind to exploit their holdings. That's the kind we're going to look at.

Tay Garnett was a typical tough-guy director, working in every genre but with a feeling for exotic climes (usually reproduced on the backlot). His reputation—that of a seventh-rate Howard Hawks, maybe—has never been hugely prestigious, and despite his frequently working on the screenplays of Hawks' films, and even making cameo appearances, the notion of Garnett as auteur never really took hold. Maybe, just maybe, this is partly due to the scarcity of some of his most interesting work.

(Fritz Lang, 1947, Exposure, PG)

Fritz Lang, whose German expressionist movies helped create film noir, saw his disciple Alfred Hitchcock surge ahead of him in Hollywood. With this psychoanalytical thriller incorporating elements of Rebecca, Suspicion and Spellbound, he sought to establish he was Hitch's equal. It proved a critical and commercial disaster but is now widely seen as a key example of Lang's "fantastical realism". A sublime, delirious melodrama, it stars Joan Bennett as a sleepwalking heiress who meets a charming architect (Michael Redgrave) in Mexico, and marries in haste. He turns out to have a bizarre family past and a weird present that includes re-creating in the basement of his New England mansion the rooms where famous murders occurred. Redgrave was cast because of his schizophrenic ventriloquist in Dead of Night. The outstanding photography is by Stanley Cortez, who shot The Magnificent Ambersons and The Night of the Hunter. The...

The CineClub is presenting biweekly screenings at the Crowley Arts Centre here in Montreal every other Sunday, and this month’s first screening is a doozy – Charles Laughton’s ahead-of-its-time chiller Night of the Hunter. Below is a brief synopsis; Hunter screens at 7pm; you can find the Crowley at 4325 rue Crowley, near Vendome metro. Admission is $8, or $6 with a student ID.

Night Of The Hunter (1955, U.S., 93 min.) Charles Laughton. A serial killing preacher terrorizes two young children on the run. A visually innovative and stunning masterwork, this is actor Charles Laughton’s sole directorial effort and reveals that his brilliant talent extended to behind the camera as well. His collaboration with cinematographer Stanley Cortez (Magnificent Ambersons by Orson Welles) resulted in a striking cinematic work that will haunt you for weeks.

Visit the official website

Doors: 7 p.m. Film: 7:30 p.m.

Admission: 8$, 6$ (students & 65+)

With complementary coffee, tea and spring water!

Mostly a Paramount star, Claudette Colbert hasn't been a frequent presence on Turner Classic Movies — that is, apart from reruns of her relatively few movies at MGM, Warner Bros., and Rko. Unfortunately, TCM's "Summer Under the Stars" day dedicated to Colbert — Friday, August 12 — won't rectify that glaring cinematic omission. [Claudette Colbert Movie Schedule.] Despite the fact that dozens of Claudette Colbert movies remain unavailable — thanks to Universal, owner of the old Paramount movie library — TCM is only presenting one Colbert premiere, Ken Annakin's British-made 1952 drama The Planter's Wife / Outpost in Malaya, co-starring Jack Hawkins. Of course, one rarely seen movie is better than none, but still… Think The Wiser Sex, The Lady Lies, Manslaughter, Young Man of Manhattan, The Phantom President (in case it's lying in some vault somewhere), The Man from Yesterday, Misleading Lady, His Woman, Zaza, Secrets of a Secretary, I Met Him in Paris, Texas Lady, Practically Yours, Skylark, Private Worlds,...

Don’t be fooled by the “physical media is dying” crowd; there are still titles worth owning!

Here are three:

Yesterday saw the release of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West in a stunning Blu-Ray transfer. This is a movie that deserves to be seen in all its glory and the record shows that this Blu-Ray is your best shot at that outside a local revival screening or your local repertory cinema. (Support these, by the way. They are important.) Joe Dante recommended this personally.

And our very own John Landis — if any one can actually claim John Landis as one’s own (hint: no one can) — actually worked on this movie and recorded a commentary for it a couple years back:

Sergio Leone’s 1968 masterpiece gives the lie to the term “spaghetti western”. In a hastily shortened version it was a box-office disappointment in the U.

By the time Samuel Fuller had made his first film, he'd been a copy boy, fought in the second world war, written a number of pulp novels and screenplays and worked as a crime reporter. His directorial debut, I Shot Jesse James [1] (1949), was already informed by a lifetime's worth of real world experience. His films are personal -- even autobiographical -- and his storytelling is aggressive. His themes are often presented in an austere nature and his imagery can be heavy handed (White Dog [2]), but his earnestness leaves me smiling rather than cringing. It makes sense that Criterion would re-release two Samuel Fuller classics, The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor, on the same day with matching cover artwork (provided by Ghost World author/illustrator Daniel Clowes). The films share a deep rooted pulp narrative that examines two of cinema's most prototypical social outcasts: hookers and schitzos. The Naked Kiss Directed...

Updated through 1/20.

"Criterion's new editions of Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (64) form a sort diptych portrait of Fuller's transition from a career forged partly within the studios to one of arduous independence," writes Josef Braun. "Low-budget, sparely furnished, continuity-negligent and starkly illuminated — with photography from the great Stanley Cortez, who shot The Magnificent Ambersons (42) and The Night of the Hunter (55) — these movies prowled the greasy peripheries of American life for tales of murder and prostitution, corrupt public services and pedophilia, incest and repressed rage. The discs feature numerous terrific supplements, including an episode of The South Bank Show that finds its featured guest Fuller in top-form, but their most inspired elements are the illustrations that adorn their packaging and screen menus, courtesy of Daniel Clowes, author of the graphic novels Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron (93), Ghost World (97), and David Boring (00). Enveloping these movies in Clowes's art enables...