by  Sandy Mandelberger, Online Dailies Editor  “Night And The City” (1950) is a neglected film noir masterpiece by the American-born director Jules Dassin. The film, a cult favorite among cinephiles but largely unknown by the public, has taken on renewed currency as the inspiration for “Broken Embraces”, the latest film from Spanish superstar director Pedro Almodóvar, which screened at the ERA New Horizons International Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. Almodovar himself...

 Thursday, March 27--------No one quite mastered the sneer as did actor Richard Widmark, who died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut at the age of 93. That sneer and a high-pitched giggling laugh is what shot him the stardom in 1947, when he played the psychopathic killer Tommy Udo in the gangster film KISS OF DEATH. Nothing in the movies before or since can compare with the scene in that film when Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved he...

The 63rd edition of the Venice film festival has opened with a salvo of noir or noirish films during which the 'dark horse' "Hollywoodland" has upstaged the odds-on favorite "Black Dahlia" which arrived with far more ballyhoo. While Dahlia, with its high-powered cast, name director Brian De Palma, and big time writer James Ellroy all on hand, was rather tepidly received at various screenings, "Hollywoodland” or 'the Death of Superman’ as the press has dubbed the film, was roundly applauded...