“A portrait of the artist as a little shit, Francois Truffaut’s debut feature The 400 Blows is a bracingly unsentimental look back at the director’s juvenile delinquent days. The kid was quite a handful. As far as great filmmakers’ fictionalized childhood stand-ins go, Antoine Doniel would probably steal Sammy Fabelman’s lunch money and stuff him in a locker.” – Crooked Marquee, 12/09/2022

“There’s a kamikaze quality to History Is Made At Night, a breathless, anything-can-happen flood of events that mirrors the headlong feeling of falling in love for the first time. The preposterous plot follows an unassailable emotional logic, so what sounds insane in synopsis seems perfectly reasonable onscreen, like a love story that starts with a phony kidnapping.” – Crooked Marquee, 12/02/2022

“Moreau wanders the Paris streets at night, abandoned and alone. Malle and cinematographer Henri Decaë shot these scenes with their camera in a baby carriage, the scandalously makeup-free star illuminated only by the lights of the city surrounding her. Quietly revolutionary, it’s one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful passages in any movie of its era.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/18/2022

“It is the month when we give thanks for leggy, duplicitous dames and doomed private dicks played for patsies. November is Noirvember, celebrating Hollywood’s hard-boiled fools for love and the frisky femme fatales that are their undoing, bringing back the best in cynical thrillers with bungled murder plots, bummer endings and sardonic voice-over narrations.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 11/04/2022

“The Outfit has been assembled with an unfussy expertise that seemed like no great shakes to film critics 49 years ago, but feels like a lost art today. Duvall is coiled like a cobra while big teddy bear Baker is expansive and gregarious. The latter basically steals the picture, lending considerable, cherubic warmth to the sometimes too-cool proceedings.” – Crooked Marquee, 11/04/2022

“Alan Parker’s scandalous supernatural thriller Angel Heart is scary as hell but also something of a hoot, with a mordant sense of humor and some of the genre’s greatest character names. The crooner is called Johnny Favorite, De Niro plays Louis Cyphre and there’s a jazz musician named Toots Sweet. Even the title turns out to be a terrible pun.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/24/2022

“Rewritten by director Amy Holden Jones, the resulting picture is a fiendishly funny parody played completely straight. So straight that a lot of dismissive critics confused it with the genuine article. But then again, as a horny pubescent I rented the movie on VHS more than once for obvious reasons, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t in on the joke, either.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/21/2022

“These are the works of a merry prankster intoxicated by the possibilities of the medium, pushing at its limitations and discovering there are none. All three stories come to tragic ends, yet what we mostly remember is how funny and cool they are; full of absurdist asides and knowing nods, flights of sublime silliness amid stylish poses and half-kidding crime plots.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/10/2022

“A titillating semiotic exercise, sending up gender roles and inverting the vampire mythos with results both provocative and ridiculous. Foregrounding female desire while flipping the script on more than just the old vampire tropes about darkness and light, it’s a Dracula tale in which the count is a countess and Mina Harker happens to be a himbo.” – Crooked Marquee, 10/07/2022

“Gould scores with a spectacular array of beautiful women. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the movie is commenting on the character’s misogyny or reveling in it. Filed under stuff you would never see onscreen today: a purring, post-coital Bergen stroking his mustache with her toes, plus a comely coed seductively running her fingers thorough the hair on his shoulders.” – Crooked Marquee, 09/30/2022