Eyes Without A Face (Les Yeux sans visage) (1960)

It doesn't add up to anything terribly important, but Georges Janu's prefunctory 1960 horror is a visual pleasure and obvious inspiration for myriad horror movies to come - Vanilla Sky, Eyes Wide Shut, Halloween, Get Out, and The Silence of the Lambs are some of the horror movies I was reminded of watching many memorable scenes: a hard-to-watch face transplant, for example, and the haunting sight of a masked Ědith Scobe as Christiane picking her way through a mansion, its gardens, and dog kennels, like a bizarre marionette.

★★★★☆

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The Big Sleep (1946)

Even Humphrey Bogart said he didn't know what was happening scene-to-scene in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's hardboiled private eye crime story, and having just read the book, I can attest that the film is faithful to its sprawling mess of a plot - sprawling because Chandler in fact wrote it by fusing two previously published short stories, merging characters, renaming others, caring less about resolving plot threads and more about building not so much a mystery as a noir character study of criminal California circa 1940, delivered in hilarious deadpan and steeped in worldweary immorality.

★★★★☆

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Another Man's Poison (1951)

This noir introduces us to Bette Davis' crime novelist, living in a gothic mansion by a windswept moor, who, we discover from the opening scene's whispered telephone box conversation, is having an affair, and from this strong thriller set-up, the movie proceeds as if trying to check off every thriller box imaginable - a dead body in a study,  an imposter and a fake marriage, a bank robbery, a criminal on the loose, not to mention animal murder and even My Cousin Rachel-style vehicle tampering - and more and more, until it runs wildly away with itself, though thankfully Davis seems aware of the absurdity and plays it for all it is worth.

★★★☆☆

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The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Featuring Dashiell Hammett's gumshoe Sam Spade - a character played in film twice before but immortalised here by Humphrey Bogart - this noir classic gives Sam Spade plenty of opportunity to stand up to big 'fat men' crime bosses, deflate femme fatale molls, and talk smart to cops-on-the-beat while being hired and rehired to chase an invaluable jewel-encrusted bird statue.

★★★★☆

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Stage Fright (1950)

It's not lauded as a masterpiece like other Hitchcock thrillers, but I think this one about an acting school student (Wyman) who becomes embroiled in a murder mystery when her friend Freddie goes on the run from police, is, from the get-go, fun, romantic, thrilling, and star-studded with Pat Hitchcock, the director's daughter debuting as an adult in her father's films (in 1936's Sabotage, she was a very young extra) and Marlene Dietrich features as a sinister rival for Freddie's affections.

★★★★☆

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Last Year in Marienbad (L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad) (1961)

 

This French New Wave cinema from 1961, about a man and woman in a hotel trying to sync their memories of their meeting (or not) a year earlier, will either infuriate or mesmerise you depending on whether you are someone who might appreciate floating dream-like through the austere and quiet Marienbad hotel with its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear and its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear and its endless corridors with carpets so thick that all sound escapes the ear...or if you are someone who prefers Arnold Schwarzenegger action and care less about sublime cinematics and poetry, give "Last Year in Marienbad" a miss. 

★★★★☆

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Sudden Fear (1952)

It's not a patch on Hitchcock's Suspicion from 1941  - that movie tells the same story but with humour, a grisly connection to true crimes, as well as the electric pairing of Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine - but this lesser Sudden Fear is still a gripping noir with a young Jack Palance starring as Crawford's playwright's new murderous man.

★★★☆☆

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The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)

Film noir often ends feeling inconsequential - why did anyone need to know that grubby little crime story? - but this 1946 classic, featuring the debut film performance of Kirk Douglas and another perfectly-cast sneering, icy performance from Barbara Stanwyck in the title role, in a story of guilt, fear, shame, and love spanning decades, is not just cynical and dark but elicits strong interest in the fates of a trio of kids, two of whom harbor a murderous secret.

★★★★☆

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The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)

The joys of The Little Shop of Horrors, which as a musical continues to lure to theatres crowds that raucously sing along and guffaw, elude me and watching this 1960 movie which started it all - not a musical but a camp scifi with a wet sense of humour and a cult following, made on a budget of $30,000 - I am nonethewiser, mystified as to why people so enjoy the story of a plant named Audrey Two which has an insatiable appetite for human blood..

★★☆☆☆

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Murder in Soho (aka 'Murder in the Night') (1939)

While murder features prominently in both titles, the British one ('Murder in Soho') and the US one ('Murder in the Night'), the murder in the movie committed by Cotton Club nightclub owner Steve Marco in his upstairs office ends up being an incidental thing compared to the debauched comedic revellry of nightclub patrons downstairs - drunken dances, food fights, romances, love rifts, etc., which all has very little to do with the murder and the dull Scotland Yard investigation that ensues.

★★☆☆☆

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The Ninth Guest (1934)

Among the more shocking moments of this 1934 horror mystery are scenes showing hysterical characters throwing themselves against the electrified door of the booby-trapped New Orleans apartment they are trapped inside having been lured there with dinner-party invitations but finding themselves not wined and dined but picked off one by one by their mysterious host, a plot that suggests Agatha Christie may have had inspiration for her famous "And Then There Were None."

★★★☆☆

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House of Secrets (1936)

*** SPOILER ALERT ***

When the new owner of Hawk's End, a property bequeathed to him in a will, visits the ramshackled house for the first time, he is told by a gun-wielding man and a mysterious blonde to leave and never return, but he repetitively goes back, each time to be told again by the gun-wielding man and the mysterious blonde never to go back, while inbetween times, he and his gumshoe friend postulate explanations for this peculiar state of affairs including the theory the house harbours a three-fingered fugitive on the run, is home to a long-lost pirate treasure, has been set up as a base for a government conspiracy, houses a murderer or, even more ridiculously, that all of these things are true, revealed in the really very silly plot's final ten minutes.

★★★☆☆

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Shadows and Fog (1991)

Woody Allen's star-studded comedy (even Madonna appears), filmed in black and white and filled with visuals recalling Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, had critics calling it an homage to German Expressionist cinema, but to what end is not clear: when John Cusack's brothel patron sighs, with Nietzschean bleakness, "There's no point to anything," he seems less to be musing on existence than reviewing the film itself, especially after so much of the comedy proves only intermittently amusing and the plot - in which Allen's Kleinman is enlisted, Kafkaesque-style, into a disorganised vigilante street gang hunting a serial killer - feels like just another Woody Allen contrivance; the late turn to weighty talk of God and man and his volitional and unvolitional or natural and unnatural impulses lands as a sudden lofty flourish atop prolonged tedium.

★★☆☆☆

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The Lighthouse (2019)

We've seen pairs of men antagonising each other in remote locations before and in much better pictures than this (for example, How I Ended The Summer) but here we go again and right from the word go, when Robert Pattinson (looking good in black and white) and Willem Dafoe land on an island where a lighthouse needs upkeep, Robert Pattison gives a look that suggests he would like to take an axe to Dafoe's head, and so what comes after their arrival - a long string of unpleasant things involving excrement, piss, farts, masturbation, yelling, bird murder and meaningless dream sequences - doesn't develop or heighten the situation so much as perpetuate it: for two long hours we really are in the Doldrums and endscenes of mental collapse (thanks, Park Chan-wook) provide no particular satisfaction or punctuation, just ever more listlessness.

★★☆☆☆

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Compulsion (1959)

Surely Ttuman Capote, often touted as the pioneer of the true crime novel, was in fact influenced either by journalist Meyer Levin's 1955 novel, Compulsion - a fiction based on the infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case - or by this movie adaptation of it which turns the disturbing subject matter (the 1924 murder in Chicago of a schoolkid at the hands of two Nietzsche-spouting teens) into an utterly compelling thriller, one that keeps so close to fact it really isn't a fiction at all - consider for example the fact that Orson Welles adopts prosthetics to look like real-life lawyer Clarence Darrow.

★★★★★

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The Elephant Man (1980)

David Lynch's second film is about Joseph 'The Elephant Man' Merrick and although the 1980 movie has a black-and-white schlock horror look, Merrick, not a ghoul, really did exist, really did suffer a congenital disorder that left him deformed from an early age, and really was exploited and abused by a freakshow exhibitor before a kind doctor introduced him to (Victorian-era) London high society.

★★★★☆

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