"A very theatrical construct of noir. Black humor, nursery rhymes, expressionist lighting, a zoological boat ride, Shelly Winters underwater, and Robert Mitchum cackling when getting shot. I can hear Charles Laughton chuckling in every scene. Best use of frightening artifice. If Mitchum only acted in one movie, if Gish only appeared in one movie, they should be proud for this to be the one. As it is, Laughton only directed one."

"Lo-fi sci-fi detective noir from 1965. Special agent Lemmy Caution is sent on a secret mission to Alphaville, a city run by an evil professor who’s built a supercomputer that specializes in mind control and strips the city’s inhabitants of all real emotion. No real special effects or futuristic props. So lean. So clean. Also, any time someone can potentially destroy a supercomputer with a poem, I’m down."

"This mesmerizingly brilliant film noir was Orson Welles’ last Hollywood movie. Dumped into second feature playdates, it’s finally become more popular than Citizen Kane. It was recut and reshot by the studio but a longer preview version surfaced a few years ago and is preferable to the well-meaning but bogus “reconstruction” edit which seems to be the extant version. Both are available on the dvd box set."

"A shadow of a man turning around a corner, casting itself so tall it reaches beyond the roofs of buildings; endless tunnels underground broken by the white light of arched openings, and the creepy and mocking music of the zither. The Third Man is a noir archetype. Orson Welles is only present for about a quarter of the film, and he still manages to take it over complete"

"Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, and Nicholas Ray: the film-noir hat trick. Based on Dorothy B. Hughes’s very different but equally brilliant novel, it’s doomy, romantic, pitch-black, and unforgettable. The Criterion extras here are particularly superb, with special attention to the movie’s turbulent backstory (Ray and Grahame were divorcing during production). This is the movie for which I’m most intensely evangelical. It feels as vital now as it did a half century ago."

"A fantastic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s captivating Ripley books, with the action shifting to New York City and Hamburg (both filmed beautifully by Repo Man’s Robby Müller). Come for the seventies-noir setting, the art-world intrigue, the cameos from the likes of Nicholas Ray; stay for the entertaining Wenders interviews on the Criterion edition, in which he regales us with how he managed to tame both Dennis Hopper and the late, great Bruno Ganz."

"Perhaps the noirest of noir films, and for my money one of the three best American films of the postwar period (the others being Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard). Featuring amazing performances from Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, and a knife-edge bitterness rare in any Hollywood film, it is at once a tribute to nighttime New York City and a devastating portrait of the power of a big-time columnist like Walter Winchell."