The Hitch-Hiker
The Hitch-Hiker (1953) is the first film noir ever directed by a woman, Ida Lupino. Only about 70 minutes long, the story follows Roy and...
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2 min read
Battles Without Honor and Humanity
I've at last ventured into the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series (Japanese: 仁義なき戦い; also known in English as The Yakuza Papers)....
1 min read
The Stranger
What can I say about The Stranger that hasn't already been said? Known also as The Outsider, written by Albert Camus, published in French...
1 min read
Italian Shoes
The first Henning Mankell novel I've read, Italian Shoes paints a vivid picture of a year in an older man's life, and is set on an...
1 min read
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
There's not a scene in this film that isn't visually and audibly disturbing. The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) left me feeling...
1 min read
Our Man in Havana
This was quite good. I read the Graham Greene novel last year and finally got around to watching the movie yesterday. Our Man in Havana...
1 min read
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) by Junot Díaz takes a tragic, humorous, violent, and incredibly clever look at three...
4 min read
The Lost Weekend
One's too many and a hundred's not enough! But no matter what Nat the barkeep tells Don (his retort, I'm not a drinker, I'm a drunk!),...
4 min read
First They Killed My Father
First They Killed My Father (Khmer: មុនដំបូងខ្មែរក្រហមសម្លាប់ប៉ារបស់ខ្ញុំ) is a 2017 Cambodian-American film starring the very young but...
2 min read
Nothing Ever Dies
Once or twice a year I read a book that dislodges my point of view and drops it someplace I hadn't known existed. Nothing Ever Dies:...
2 min read
Raw Deal
This wasn't what I'd expected. A simple enough plot: Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe) is in the pen for a crime that isn't revealed to us....
1 min read
Deep River
Shusaku Endo's 1993 novel Deep River (深い河, or Fukai Kawa) follows a group of Japanese tourists on a tour of Buddhist sites in India. Each...
2 min read
The Endless Trench
The Endless Trench is a Spanish historical drama with elements of psychological thriller, released in 2019. Directed by Jon Garaño and...
2 min read
The Virgin Spring
Set in a medieval Sweden wedged between paganism and Christianity and sodden with guilt, The Virgin Spring (1960) tells a tale of rape...
2 min read
Japanese Fairy Tales
A dragon king, tongue-clipped sparrow, sake-drinking tortoise, vengeful rabbit, pitiful hare, flying paper crane, and luminous beings...
1 min read
The Killing
Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film noir The Killing is a heist flick told in three ways. We get the documentary style first, with a narrator...
1 min read
The White Tiger
The White Tiger (2008) by Aravind Adiga is light prose loaded with scathing dark humor. Winner of the Man Booker Prize, and Adiga's first...
1 min read
The Sound of Waves
The Sound of Waves (1954) by Yukio Mishima is a fairly slim novel that rather surprised me. After reading his Death in Midsummer and...
3 min read
Sansho the Bailiff
Sansho the Bailiff (1954; also called Sanshō Dayū, and in Japanese 山椒大夫) is a film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi that Japanese cinema fans,...
2 min read
The Memory Police
The Memory Police, a novel by Yōko Ogawa, was published in 1994 and then translated by Stephen Snyder for its 2019 release in English....
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