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1 month ago | 
slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Jake Cole
There’s a sentimental heart to Michael Mann’s films, as much as his fans might not like to hear about it. Run a movie like Heat or Thief alongside the finest crime novels of the same bygone era Mann taps as fuel for his ongoing, elegiac meta-saga on heist men, bag men, and hit men. Run them against key works by Westlake, Chandler, Hammett, or Bezzerides—authors whose heroes and antiheroes are all hard, bad edges.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Derek Smith
Like most of the cinema’s recurring images and sensations, there’s no precise “first movie” about the maladjusted, dissatisfied, wounded soul (usually a man, a brooding lion with a thorn in his paw), but the floodgates about this most serious of fellows seemed to open just after World War II.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Derek Smith
It’s been almost 70 years since the first of four film adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers was released and in that time we’ve yet to meet a single one of these so-called “snatchers.” I suppose that’s the point, since if they have to snatch a body, they don’t have bodies.
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Jul 12, 2024 | 
newsbreak.com | Jaime N. Christley
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments.
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Jun 16, 2024 | 
newsbreak.com | Jaime N. Christley
Welcome to NewsBreak, an open platform where diverse perspectives converge. Most of our content comes from established publications and journalists, as well as from our extensive network of tens of thousands of creators who contribute to our platform. We empower individuals to share insightful viewpoints through short posts and comments.
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Jun 16, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Derek Smith
Nineteen forty-seven was a crucial year for Robert Mitchum’s rising star. The enduring popular classic, of course, is Jacques Tourneur’s seminal Out of the Past, and he headlined Edward Dmytryk’s Oscar-nominated prestige thriller Crossfire. It’s in Raoul Walsh’s noirish, Freudian western Pursued, though, that we see Mitchum crossing the divide between what Hollywood expected of the young man and the godlike figure they got in return.
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May 2, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Derek Smith
Obviously it wasn’t by design, but the early-1950s renewal of the western genre, aided in large part by the success of Winchester ’73, which heralded a career second act for both its director, Anthony Mann, and its star, James Stewart, was answered in other quarters of the industry by multiple endeavors to take the once disreputable genre, previously dismissed as Roy Rogers/Saturday-matinee bunkum, all the way into the hallowed halls of state-sanctioned, capital-A art.
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Feb 22, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Derek Smith
Although he only made two fiction features, filmmaker Michael Roemer benefited greatly from an early rediscovery in the 1990s, thanks to the fortuitous unearthing of a film he made in 1969, The Plot Against Harry, a wry, dry comedy starring Martin Priest. His other film, 1964’s Nothing But a Man, is often compared by critics to the slicker, middle-America-friendly films that Sidney Poitier was making during the same era.
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Feb 6, 2024 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Derek Smith
Within the same broad outline as Jean Renoir’s La Chienne, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street strikes many notes to emphasize the emasculation of Christopher “Chris” Cross (Edgar G.
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Nov 15, 2023 | 
slantmagazine.com | Jaime N. Christley |Jake Cole
When Martin Scorsese finally won the directing Oscar for 2006’s The Departed, he inspired a handful of film buffs to point out the supposed travesty implied by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences long ignoring the landmark titles on the filmmaker’s resume in favor of a remake.
