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Los Angeles has always had a complicated relationship with its own image. It is a city that sells dreams, manufactures celebrities, and promises opportunity to anyone willing to chase the…
There are few comic book settings as immediately recognizable as Basin City, a place where criminals operate with little fear of consequence, the police are frequently compromised, and violence is…
There are few things more unsettling in crime fiction than discovering that the person responsible for maintaining order is also the person most deserving of suspicion. Noir has explored this…
Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) begins with a deceptively simple observation about a town whose name has become synonymous with everything wrong with it. Personville is what appears on the…
There is something fundamentally wrong with the world of Kiss Me Deadly. From its opening moments, Robert Aldrich’s 1955 thriller establishes an atmosphere of desperation, hostility and impending disaster that…
Few films occupy quite the same unusual place in cinema as Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter. Released in 1955, this adaptation of Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel, with a…
Few films capture the atmosphere of film noir quite like Carol Reed’s The Third Man. Set against the ruins of postwar Vienna, the 1949 British film noir transforms a city…
There is something particularly cruel about a man who believes he has finally escaped his past, only to discover that everything he has done to leave it behind has brought…
Long before graphic novels became a widely recognized form of literary storytelling, Will Eisner was demonstrating just how much could be accomplished within the pages of a comic book. With…
Few films have captured the darker side of human nature as effectively as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. Released in 1944, this crime thriller helped establish many of the conventions associated…