Film students across the world come to be familiar with Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour because it's one of the first examples of the "noir" genre; it makes clever use of its low budget and it offers a classic, if simplistic, story on how men and women can manipulate each other into horrendous actions. While all of these are the reasons why the film still holds up today, it's also more fun to think of Detour as the 1940s equivalent of Stranger Than Paradise or Clerks. Super low-budget and completely pioneering in its time for depicting human behavior, this is a film that can still prove to people that quality films can be made outside of Hollywood.

The story opens up on a grizzled and paranoid-looking Al Roberts, who staggers into a diner somewhere in the barren remoteness of Southern California, just outside of Los Angeles. He reacts harshly when somebody in the diner plays a particular song on the jukebox and, after apologizing and being nearly kicked out, he drinks his coffee and begins to tell his story over narration.

The Proposition is story of a lawman (Winstone) down under that gives a career killer (Pearce) the chance to save his little brother from the gallows if he can find his older brother (Huston) and execute him.

Written by musician Nick Cave of Bad Seeds fame, the script is brutal, authentic and filled with fantastic period dialogue. Every character is brilliantly realized - no true heroes or absolute villains - just multi-dimensional people wrapped up in a tragic place. Cave and Warren Ellis provide the film’s score with is a glorious mixture between primal sounds of the native culture, mixed with contemporary instruments.

John Hillcoat’s direction never shies away from showing the harsh and bloody violence of the Australian frontier when settlers battle with the aborigines, to the point of genocide.

Tom Stall is a peaceful diner owner living in a small town with his wife and children until one day a group of dangerous men show up, unwinding a mystery.

Based on a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vincent Locke, Josh Olson’s subtle screenplay is taut, raw and engrossing. Because the subject matter is so dark and without a hint of the supernatural, it would be hard to tell it came from a comic book. But all in all, it is one of the best adaptations from the medium to hit the big screen so far.

David Cronenberg, mainly known for making surreal work like Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, delivers one of the best and most original crime tales of this decade. He directs the film with such creepiness and dread that it will stick with you long after it’s over. Cronenberg captures perfectly both ideal Americana and its underbelly with equal truth and originality. Since it pertains to the film’s themes, it should be mentioned how brutally raw and unflinchingly honest the violence is.

After spending lives in ill repute, Gal and Aitch, along with their wives, have found peace in the hills of Spain, until a former colleague crashes the party and all hell breaks loose.

Ray Winston (The Departed) plays “Gal,” a soft-spoken teddy bear of a man just trying to enjoy a calm life in Spain with his ex-porn star wife. As much as he wants a peaceful existence, the London mob has no plans to let this skilled safecracker walk away from the show.

Ian McShane (HBO’s Deadwood) is frightening as the serpentine-like boss of the gangsters. Dressed in all black with those piercing eyes, McShane manages to be extremely unnerving while saying nothing. And when he speaks, you understand why is so feared.

Sir Ben Kingsley (Sneakers) won an Academy Award for playing the world’s most famous pacifist, Gandhi. London gangster “Don Logan” is anything but. Although small in stature, Kingsley’s Logan is one of the most ferocious and rabid of any criminal character to hit the screen. He is a man easily thrown into fits of rage to cover the little bits of confused humanity he has in him. His non-stop cursing and edgy body language make it impossible to pull your eyes from him in every scene he is in.

A SUPER MOVIE WITH AN EXTRA SUPER 8 MINUTES ADDED!

MEANWHILE IN A LIVING ROOM...
I must say that I have never been much of a Superman fan. Into Batman. Superman, not so much. However, after stumbling into a friend’s living room screening of Superman: The Movie (Director's Cut) one Saturday afternoon I can definitely appreciate the super guy more than I ever have, for several reasons.

My friend has a new HD television [lucky!]. The version of Superman we were watching was on Blu-Ray Disc. It was the Director’s Cut with an added 8 minutes of footage. I had never seen the entire movie from beginning to end. It’s really one of the best superhero movies made, as far as I can tell. And Christopher Reeve is pretty darn handsome!

TALES FROM THE KRYPTON
The film opens with Superman's biological father Jor-El (Marlon Brando) banishing criminals (watch Superman II) and informing a council of his beloved planet Krypton's impending demise. So he does the only thing any decent father would do:  he loads up a spiky space pod with all the things his son will need, including the son, and jettisons him out into space for safe-keeping.

Touch of Evil is one in a long list of artistic triumphs for Orson Welles that was scandalously treated as a failure from the “lost years” of his post-Citizen Kane free-fall of a film career. Nowadays the film has been accorded the status of an absolute crime film classic usually referred to as the last real film noir of the original cycle. But try telling that to the dumb dumbs at Universal who decided to ignore his 58 page memo on crucial edits to the film and instead cobbled together their own sanitized version of his deliriously sleazy border town saga—a baroque mixture of pulp noir and Shakespearian tragedy as only Welles could envision and execute. Touch of Evil was meant to be Welles’ Hollywood studio return to form after a decade spent in European exile chasing money to fund his mostly dead-ended film projects. But as with so many events in Welles’s Hollywood career the end result was a cold, stilted, even hostile reaction to his exhilarating achievement. He could never shake his reputation as the enfant terrible of tinsel town and this black cloud of notoriety had a habit of eventually destroying any opportunities that lay ahead of him no matter the evidence to the contrary that he generally worked on time and under budget.

Playing with sound and image, image without sound and sound without image. White text over black. Questions answered by the opposite sex in the form of questions. French New Wave icons. Gunshots and the symbolic separation of fifteen acts. In classic Godard narrative form, the film searches for the line between the male and female and proposes a parallel of these relationships to social problems in contemporary times.

Godard has the ability to make a conversation half a film. That’s not exactly the case here, but I’m not far off. Sometimes scenes like that may seem long and tedious but here, somehow, it’s never dull and never without style. Meet Paul and Madeleine. Hardly ever in contemporary film can we observe and study characters in such casualty. Yet even in casualness their interaction bridges on the topic of more tangible matters – Bob Dylan, her reaction to his approach, a play on words... Later, Paul’s interrogation towards other women explore heavy topics – from sex to birth control, to views towards Capitalist America, to the concerns of Vietnam War. We may not agree with Paul’s views or the female’s answers, but Godard’s antics do leave something to be desired. Society is reviewed in a brutally honest form in this modern time and still to this day I can relate.

William Richert’s first feature was every young filmmaker’s dream. He was to direct Winter Kills, a big budget thriller based on a novel from best-selling author Richard Condon, starring Hollywood stars Jeff Bridges, John Huston, Eli Wallach, and Anthony Perkins as well as international luminaries Toshiro Mifune and Tomas Milian. He assembled a crew of professionals including Vilmos Szigmond, the cinematographer of McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Deliverance, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Robert Boyle, the production designer on three Hitchcock films. And he started dating the film’s female lead, model Belinda Bauer. On its release Winter Kills received rave reviews from The New York Times and The New Yorker, yet after a week it was pulled from theaters. What sinister force didn’t want the public to see it?