Noir lurks in shadows of film Tales of hard-boiled detectives, dangerous dames available on DVD By JOHN FARR Stamford Advocate Friday, July 30, 2004 It all started with the hard-boiled detective fiction that exploded into American popular culture in the...

The room is dark and we are talking of fathers and sons. And what else would one talk about with Chen Kaige, the great Chinese director, who as a son twisted that relationship to the breaking point, wantonly, willingly and for base reasons....

Watching the action from the wings isn't in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's blood.With the presidential campaign fully engaged _ and the U.S. Constitution barring the foreign-born movie star-turned-high-profile-politician from running himself _ Schwarzenegger is finding ways to play a role in politics' biggest drama.He elevated his...

Two Royal Air Force jets shadowed a Russian strategic bomber that approached British air space last week, the Ministry of Defense said Tuesday.The incident occurred Friday, the same day Russian President Vladimir Putin flexed his military's muscle by placing strategic bombers back on long-range patrol...

Beginning with Shadows, the films of John Cassavetes have been at once limited and defined by their anti-intellectual form of humanism, an unconditional acceptance of the social norms of his characters that exalts emotion and intuition over analysis and, in narrative terms, looseness and approximation over precision. Used as an instrument for delivering a thesis (as in Faces) and/or allowing actors to indulge themselves in fun and games (as in Husbands), it is a style which characteristically operates like ...

Shadows, Faces, Husbands: John Cassavetes' titles serve both to define and to impersonalise his films' subject area. The announced theme provides a broad orientation, but the audience is finally left to interpret the raw material—fragmented narrative, improvised dialogue and action, long sequences apparently incidental to the main characters—at will. Thus, Husbands … is both a 'universal' male's-eye-view of marital restlessness and a haphazard idiosync...

American films have become so glossy in their technical mastery and box-office attitudes that one greets with surprise and a sort of awe an independent group of film artists, not particularly interested in financial gain, who have created a celluloid diamond of neorealism and called it Shadows. It is, first of all, the best American film about racial relations yet made. Secondly, one hopes it heralds the beginning of a tradition of cinematic vitality and honesty dealing with the experiences of ordinary huma...