Movie Diary 4/23/2012

T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947). I don’t know why, but the DVD transfer didn’t look as bad as it did last time I watched it. The dark, very violent noir comes as a contrast to the voice-of-authority narrator, who doesn’t seem to know what kind of movie he is describing.

The Black Book (Anthony Mann, 1949). This burn-on-demand DVD looks pretty great, and the style of Mann and DP John Alton looks consistent with the pictures they made that were not about the French Revolution. What the French would call a “black movie.”

At What a Feeling!, a week of British films from the 1980s begins with a review of Stephen Frears’ and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette.