To finish off this year’s November-long celebration of crime film and fiction, we dust off a strange little amalgam of western and noir film, which finds a train stopping off at a small California town for the first time in a few years and depositing a one-armed man. He will bring questions and trouble to […]
Read more "He Doesn’t Take A Hint, Does He: Bad Day At Black Rock"Producer Peter Denver (Van Heflin) bids adieu to his beloved wife Iris (Gene Tierney) who is needed to tend after her sickly mother a plane ride away, but only after agreeing to attend the party of his diva upstairs neighbor Carlotta “Lottie” Marin (Ginger Rogers). He tries to appear and disappear, but her henpecked husband […]
Read more "You Believe Me, Don’t You: Black Widow (1954)"When the Cutlers arrive at Niagara Falls for their delayed honeymoon, Ray (Max Showalter) and Polly (Jean Peters) expect to wear raincoats and ride the Maid of the Mists and do all the cheesy stuff that Cary Grant’s character pooh-poohed in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), though maybe without going over the falls in a […]
Read more "Honeymoon With Homicide: Niagara"Q (Omar Epps), Bishop (Tupac Shakur), Steel (Jermaine Hopkins), and Raheem (Khalil Kain) are four friends growing up in a rough Harlem neighborhood. They dodge cops, a gang of Puerto Rican bullies, and school security guards, they run from the record store they rip albums off from, and when Q goes into a bar to […]
Read more "Top of the World: Juice"Russell Stevens, Jr. (Laurence Fishburne) started out life as the son of a junkie father (Glynn Turman) and witnessed the man’s shooting death after robbing a liquor store. He did not grow up to be an addict himself, instead moving into a career in law enforcement. When DEA agent Gerald Carter (the always watchable Charles […]
Read more "Vice Versa: Deep Cover"Nicholas Bruiseman was a detective in the badlands of Midland, one of the small cities on the west side of Texas just this side of the oil fields. After a lousy decision and worse luck found him on the wrong side of a courtroom hearing, he was allowed to skip a jail term on the […]
Read more "Late Nights in West Texas: Stephen Graham Jones’ Not For Nothing"Nino Brown (Wesley Snipes) has a plan to ascend to the top of the drug dealing food chain. Using crack cocaine, he can hook people in seconds. Cut out the mobsters, get a supply directly from the Peruvians, and he can save on graft, putting that money directly into investment. But Nino dreams bigger. He […]
Read more "The World Is Mine: New Jack City"Isaac (Glynn Turman) is burning the candle at both ends, studying for law school when not running a cab all over NOLA. When he takes a night off with his girl Christella (Joan Pringle) and some friends, he makes the mistake of becoming a guinea pig in a hypnosis show. He opens his shirt and […]
Read more "Good to Have You Back, Blood: J.D.’s Revenge"A coupe of hoods make their way through the city, ending up in a Harlem apartment where money is getting counted and packaged up by a trio of Black men. When the cops arrive, the five tough guys freeze, but these aren’t cops at all. Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) and Joe Logart (Ed Bernard) are […]
Read more "Ratta-tat-tat: Across 110th Street"When Reverend Deke O’Malley (Calvin Lockhart) comes to Harlem with promises of building The Black Beauty, a massive ship designed to deliver his people back to Africa, he is met with both awe and … well, reverence by the people. Only $100 (or all your life’s savings, in the case of the really poor) will […]
Read more "Is That Black Enough For You: Cotton Comes to Harlem"
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