Life and Death in L.A.

Left, Kathleen Turner, William Hurt, "Body Heat" (1981). Right, Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, "Double Indemnity" (19...

Timothy Carey, “The Killing” (1956). By Paul Parcellin Timothy Carey was the kind of actor who refused to fade into the background — even a...

Elliot Gould, "The Long Goodbye" (1973) One of my favorite neo-noirs is “The Long Goodbye” (1973), Robert Altman’s adaptation of t...

Rod Steiger, 'The Big Knife' (1955). Face it, scandals make good news copy and the Los Angeles entertainment industry produces a bu...

Robert Mitchum in 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' (1973). How Boston labor union muscle terrorized Hollywood film crews N o one was qui...

Brad Pitt and Mike Moh, 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.' Ever since it hit the screen in 2019 there’s been a lot of talk about Quen...

I s Steven Soderbergh’s tech thriller “Kimi” neo noir? Call it what you like, a crime thriller, perhaps, but the film, streaming on HBO Max,...

  I should have known better than to smuggle a chicken burrito into the theater from the taqueria next door to it. Why, you ask? Let’s jus...

After having defined "film noir" as a black and white medium in a recent post , I'd like to point out that I was referring to ...