“War is a criminal business; I fight it with criminals.” From Emil Jannings winning the first every best actor Oscar in 1928 for The Last Command through to the recent success of Dunkirk, war pictures have maintained their currency. Of course, their popularity has ebbed and flowed...

Plenty of themes at play this year: imprisonment; forbidden love; heroism in combat. 2017 was a decent year for grown-up comic book adaptations and it was also a year where, bizarrely, John Denver’s Take Me Home (Country Roads) played a crucial role in the plot of not one but two...

Author Donald Westlake’s two greatest creations are criminals. Both are fundamentally honest and supremely meticulous planners but that’s where the similarities end. Parker is focused, laconic and won’t hesitate to kill on his way to his goal, whereas Dortmunder is a...

Eric Red hit Hollywood with a bang in the mid-eighties. His screenplays for The Hitcher and Near Dark were both highly acclaimed so it’s no surprise that his next opportunity should be to direct another of his scripts. This came in the form of Cohen and Tate, a tense thriller following...

There’s a scene early on in Silent Running that nicely encapsulates the vibe the film. The technicians aboard the USS Valley Forge, one of four spaceships orbiting Saturn, are having lunch as they await an imminent radio order from Earth. Three of the spacemen are eating freeze dried...

Murder is, by definition, no laughing matter. So it’s disconcerting to hear the details of a particularly sanguinary killing, the roadside shooting of a Texas policeman, recalled and recounted by an array of jolly smiling faces. The Thin Blue Line was filmed in 1987 and revisits a...

“Personally I don’t trust Mexis.” “Personally I do. I’ve even forgotten the Alamo.” Boy, oh boy. Delmer Daves sure liked to subvert the stereotypes of the Western, didn’t he? After adapting Hamlet for the oater crowd with Jubal and showing that native...

The cop working his last case before retirement, the white colonist making arrogant demands of natives, the recently divorced private investigator caught in a tangled web, the superhero fighting the big bad guy and saving his girl. 2016 cinema certainly trod familiar paths but it was also...

That Mark Rosman worked prior to this picture with Brian De Palma should come as no surprise. The House on Sorority Row owes as much to that director’s work as it does to the Gialli that made such an impact on Italian cinema in the 70s and 80s. All the tropes are present: nubile young...

As Richard Nixon, Bob Halderman and every other politician caught in the wake of the Watergate break-in can tell you, it’s often not the original crime that will do you in but rather the cover-up. It’s a lesson that Mark Dixon, the cop at the heart of Where The Sidewalk Ends would...

The first time Rose spies the handsome Tommy Swann in It Always Rains on Sunday she’s smitten. She’s working the bar in an East End London boozer when the saloon doors open and Tommy sweeps in wearing a double-breasted suit, a hat tilted just so and a cigarette dangling from his...