Film Noir: The Dark Side Of Cinema II (Thunder on the Hill / The Price of Fear / The Female Animal) (Blu-ray) by Stuart Galbraith IV Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema II is a fun collection of three titles all centered around women played by leading ladies at or approaching the twilight of their starring careers: Thunder on the Hill (1951) with Claudette Colbert; The Price of Fear (1956) with Merle Oberon; and The Female Animal (1958) with Hedy Lamarr. By far the best of the three pictures, Thunder on the Hill is a noir-flavored mystery-thriller, set at a convent-hospital in Norfolk, England. The solution to the mystery is pretty obvious early on, but Douglas Sirk's direction, particularly the way he uses the production's lavish but underemphasized sets, offset the problems with the script. A torrential rainstorm and flood send evacuating villagers to the conve...Read the entire review »

Emma. (2020) (Blu-ray) by Oktay Ege Kozak The Movie: The debate about who or what invented the structure and formula of movie rom-coms goes back to Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, or the resurgence of screwball comedies in 1930's Hollywood. I believe it goes further back, to Jane Austen's passionate but amicable romance novels about then-modern-minded young aristocratic women who stumble into unexpected love, while tackling the growing pains of adulthood. It's no surprise that Austen's work can easily be fitted into modern rom-coms, like the Bridget Jones series moonlighting for Pride and Prejudice. One can simply imagine high school coming of age rom-coms like Pretty in Pink as Victorian-era tales of female self-discovery, or reinterpretation of Austen's work into the tone of a contemporary youth romance. Emma succeeds delightfully in the second category. Direct...Read the entire review »