Showing results for "Noir" in Film & TV

In this intensive, intimate, and anything-but-glamorous behind-the-scenes account, film insider and cinephile Paul M. Sammon explores how Ridley Scott used his creative genius to transform the work of science fiction's most uncompromising author into a critical sensation, a commercial success, and a cult classic that would reinvent the genre.

This revised and expanded edition of Eddie Muller's Dark City is a film noir lover's bible, taking readers on a tour of the urban landscape of the grim and gritty genre in a definitive, highly illustrated volume. Dark City expands with new chapters and a fresh collection of restored photos that...

With a connoisseur's insight and an offbeat sensitivity perfectly tailored to his subjects, Gifford's brief essays cover a hundred of the noir buff's favorites. His highly polished impressions take the listener through five decades of noir to find both the heart and the art of the plotline.

In this revised and expanded edition of his essential volume Dark City Dames, Eddie Muller—Turner Classic Movies host and author of Dark Cityand Noir Bar—offers a uniquely intimate look at the women who defined film noir, now featuring updated text and 10 new star profiles. Film noir was the...

Film noir: the name comes from the French for “black” or “dark film.” It points to the central feature of the genre: mood. There is a darkness about film noir, a somberness accompanied by a thrill of dread and ever-present danger. This aura envelops wealthy heiresses, English aristocrats, tough-guy drifters, jazz musicians, drug dealers, and respected schoolteachers—all of whom have secrets to hide and much to lose if those secrets are unveiled.

Noir emerged as a prominent American film genre in the early 1940s, distinguishable by its use of unusual lighting, sinister plots, mysterious characters, and dark themes. From The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), films from this classic period reflect an atmosphere of corruption and social decay that attracted such accomplished directors as John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles.

If you're watching a movie where a world-weary detective is having trouble with a "dame" or a "broad", and cigarette smoke is wafting through the scene - you're probably appreciating a bit of "film noir". Film noir literally means black film referring to both the look and the attitude of these movies.

Noir - as a style, movement, or sensibility - has its roots in hardboiled detective fiction by writers like Chandler and Hammett, and films adapted from their novels were among the first called "film noir" by French cineastes. But film isn't the only medium with a taste for a dark story. Hundreds of noir dramas have been produced for television, featuring detectives and femmes fatales, gangsters, and dark deeds, continuing week after week, with a new disruption of the social order. In TV Noir, television historian Allen Glover presents the first complete study of the subject.

The behind-the-scenes story of the quintessential film noir and cult classic, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity—its true crime origins and crucial impact on film history—is told for the first time in this riveting narrative published for the film's 80th anniversary. From real crime to serial...

The basis for the HBO Original Series starring Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore), Zach Galifianakis (The Hangover), and Ted Danson, Bored to Death is a Raymond Chandleresque tale of a struggling Brooklyn writer—curiously named Jonathan Ames—who, in a moment of odd whimsy and boredom, becomes a...

From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. This book offers a comprehensive chronological survey of Black horror from the 1890s to present day. In this second edition, Robin R. Means Coleman expands upon the history of notable characterizations of Blackness in horror cinema, with new chapters spanning the 1960s, 2000s, and 2010s to the present, and examines key levels of Black participation on screen and behind the camera. The book addresses a full range of Black horror films.

Why do we keep returning to Agatha Christie's ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us, and what accounts for the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The Mysterious Romance of Murder, the poet and critic David Lehman explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies—some famous (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to aficionados—with style, wit, and passion.