My 2025 Personal Film Festival, Part 3 and Conclusion

For Parts 1 and 2 of this series, please see here and here. Just to reiterate, I am not a film critic in the traditional sense, merely an autodidactic lover of film and film history who curated his own, somewhat random, film festival over the first four months of 2025. It began when my wife … Continue reading My 2025 Personal Film Festival, Part 3 and Conclusion →

My 2025 Personal Film Festival, Part 2

For Part 1 of this series, please see here. I reiterate that I am not a film critic in the traditional sense, just an autodidactic lover of film and film history. By the time I finished rewatching Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007), No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) and Nosferatu: A Symphony … Continue reading My 2025 Personal Film Festival, Part 2 →

I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Conclusion

Part 1 of this essay may be found here. Part 2 of this essay may be found here. Part 3 of this essay may be found here. Part 4 of this essay may be found here. Part 5 of this essay may be found here. Part 6 of this essay may be found here. Part … Continue reading I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Conclusion →

I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Part 7

Part 1 of this essay may be found here. Part 2 of this essay may be found here. Part 3 of this essay may be found here. Part 4 of this essay may be found here. Part 5 of this essay may be found here. Part 6 of this essay may be found here. The … Continue reading I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Part 7 →

I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Part 4

Part 1 of this essay may be found here. Part 2 of this essay may be found here. Part 3 of this essay may be found here. When I awoke late on the afternoon of Thursday, February 15, 2001 in my small studio apartment in West Philadelphia, I felt completely rotten. And more than a … Continue reading I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Part 4 →

I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Part 3

Part 1 of this essay may be found here. Part 2 of this essay may be found here. When I awoke in my new apartment – on the 8th floor of the Madison Building in the Presidential Apartment complex, situated where City Avenue meets the Schuylkill Expressway – on Wednesday, February 14, 2001, the temperature … Continue reading I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Part 3 →

I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Part 2

Part 1 of this essay may be found here. I cannot remember exactly when I first saw Hammett. By which I mean, when I first watched the second half of the 1982 film, a fictional account set in 1928 San Francisco, just before the eponymous writer published his first novel. One night, while I was … Continue reading I Never Wrote the Most Important Story I Ever Wrote, Part 2 →

Who Is the Most Heroic Character in Film Noir?

A few days, I published an essay distilling my thoughts about a hypothetical Film Noir Cinematic Universe (“FNCU”). In a tweet I wrote to make readers aware of this essay, I said, “While there are a ridiculous number of villains in #FilmNoir, I was genuinely surprised how many legitimate #heroes there are.” ***WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD*** … Continue reading Who Is the Most Heroic Character in Film Noir? →

Grappling With the Instinctive – and Unnecessary – Fictionalization of History

I recently watched Michael Mann’s Public Enemies for the first time since its 2009 theatrical release. Based on Bryan Burrough’s excellent 2004 book of the same name, it narrows the focus of the sprawling book to the cat-and-mouse game played by bank robber John Dillinger and Melvin Purvis, special agent in charge of the Chicago … Continue reading Grappling With the Instinctive – and Unnecessary – Fictionalization of History →

Finding The Worst Character In Neo-Noir: Setting The Brackets

WARNING: Spoilers ahead!! [Editor's note: In an earlier version of this post, I neglected to include Woo-Jin Lee in my Cunning Manipulator list, so I correct this post by adding him and removing Hedra Carlson] In a previous post, I used two metrics—POINTS and Opportunity-Adjusted POINTS (“OAP”) to identify 96 films most often cited as … Continue reading Finding The Worst Character In Neo-Noir: Setting The Brackets →