By Jake Rutkowski. About twenty minutes into The King’s Choice, it hits me: I know absolutely nothing about Norway’s political history. Nor its governmental structure. Nor its involvement in World War II. Nothing. While there are some informational title cards at the start of the film, I found myself bereft of […]

By Tony Williams. Based on Cornell Woolrich’s 1944 novel The Black Path of Fear, The Chase (1946) has long required a remastered DVD version though bootleg versions previously available may have added to its reputation as a darker shade of noir appropriately associated with its creative source. It was directed […]

By Jake Rutkowski. There are few time capsules more compelling to me than works in which Golden Age Hollywood peels back the curtain on its own sordid affairs. What normally proceeds is melodrama in the throes of self-aggrandizement, tempered by winking metatext that points to the absurdity of it all. […]

By Elias Savada. The general belief that there is seemingly civil attitude toward one another in our planet’s clean, sterile looking future reflects the sci-fi genre’s long-standing notion that there is no clutter in our lives down the road. As seen in Realive, an existential look into life after death […]

By Louis J. Wasser. In the late 1940s, a man from New Hampshire named Albert Johnston, Jr. wrote a letter to film documentarian Louis de Rochemont. Johnston, in his early 20s, alluded to the book Lost Boundaries written by William L. White about his father, the elder Albert Johnston, a […]

By Tony Williams. Back in 1965 BBC TV screened a documentary introduced by Dirk Bogarde, The Epic that Never Was, an informative analysis of a 1937 failed film version of I, Claudius that would have been directed by Josef von Sternberg starring Charles Laughton in a role that would later be […]