Lost in the Inky Blackness of Fear

by Tony Dayoub

The softly lit visage of fortune teller Mrs. Bellane (Hillary Brooke, pictured above) is a reminder, mid-way through 1944's Ministry of Fear, that director Fritz Lang's films frequently (and almost obstinately) take place in dread-suffused, self-contained worlds. The setting for this noir is no different. An anti-Nazi propaganda film adapted from a novel by Graham Greene, Ministry of Fear plays out as if it were a dark nightmare in the head of protagonist Stephen Neale (Ray Milland). There are markers from the real world sketchily providing a backdrop that is vaguely lifelike. But much like in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, in which the labyrinthine New York streets don't resemble any Manhattan we're familiar with, Neale's London bears only the remotest affinity to its real-world counterpart.

NYFF50 Sidebars: Cinéastes/Cinema of Our Time & On the Arts

by Tony Dayoub

The NYFF continues this week with an extensive slate that includes a couple of interesting sidebars. The first I had a chance to catch a couple of screenings for is Cinéastes/Cinema of Our Time. It's a revival of a pair of documentary series produced for French television by André S. Labarthe in which notable film directors, both contemporary and classic, are interviewed for quite a longer and more in-depth session than audiences raised in the DVD-featurette-age might be accustomed to.

Blu-ray Review: M (1931)

by Tony Dayoub

Director Fritz Lang (1890-1976), Germany's expressionist gift to the American film noir, is currently enjoying quite the resurgence. Restorations of Lang's famous Metropolis (1927) and misunderstood Die Nibelungen (1932) recently saw their premiere. And out today on Criterion Blu-ray and DVD is the film many—including the revered director—believe to be his finest work, M. This tense, fascinatingly complex look at a serial child killer is the film the current horror flick A Nightmare on Elm Street could never even hope to be.