Criticature: "Scarlet Street" - 3/9/10

This is literally the quintessential gold digger movie. Doused in shadows and lit with the passionate flames which fuel the greed of a conniving young couple (Dan Duryea and Joan Bennett), the sorry sap of a bank accountant in mid-life crisis being taken for the proverbial ride is at once recognizable and no less palatable now than it was then. And I mean that in the best way!

Criticature: "Fury" - 2/22/10

Seeing Spencer Tracey this young is honestly a little disconcerting. But in seriousness, speaking to the director’s own sordid flight from Nazi Germany in 1933, Fritz Lang’s social issue movie about a man wrongfully-accused against a lynch mob is at once resonant, chilling and passionately constructed. His first film in a repertoire of Hollywood movies that harkens the birth of American film noir, “Fury” has not only aged well, but has done so in a way that only further accentuates the beauty and ugliness of its time-honored truth, storybook ending or no.