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Talk about turnarounds: Hollywood is getting high marks this week for two timely hits that are being devoured by Gen Z audiences worldwide.

Filmgoers are lauding the game-based A Minecraft Movie and the original thriller Sinners — a veritable feast of video games and vampires.

And memories are short. Two years ago at this moment studio chiefs were running for cover, film releases were canceled, strikes were looming and Warner Bros. announced that all its product would be released as streaming movies. The studio even came up with the perfect counterprogramming for Oppenheimer: It was called Coyote vs Acme, basking in the afterglow of Looney Tunes.

Then came the show-stopper: Emerging from the mist was a concept called Barbenheimer. A few critics threw up their hands until Tom Cruise promised to see Oppenheimer and Barbie back to back. Even Scorsese lent his endorsement. The Coyote had vanished into the pink cloud of Barbiedom.

The Warner Archive comes through with a film noir gem that still has the power to make one’s skin crawl, as a pair of circus sharpshooters go on the lam, using their skills to pull off cheap robberies. The clammy feeling of being cut off from society, having no place to go, is expressed in near-existential terms. Peggy Cummins’ cheap tease Annie Laurie Starr promises John Dall’s Bart Tare eternal love, but what good are promises from a psycho?

Gun Crazy

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1949 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 87 min. / Street Date , 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Kroeger, Anabel Shaw, Harry Lewis, Nedrick Young, Rusty Tamblyn, Morris Carnovsky.

Cinematography: Russell Harlan

Film Editor: Harry Gerstad

Production Designer: Gordon Wiles

Original Music: Victor Young

Written by Dalton Trumbo and MacKinlay Kantor from his short story

Produced by Frank King, Maurice King

Directed by...

Hollywood film actor who starred in the now-revered 1950 B-movie Gun Crazy, a forerunner of Bonnie and Clyde

The British actor Peggy Cummins, who has died aged 92, was discovered by the Hollywood mogul Darryl F Zanuck when she was a teenager and almost immediately given the lead in his big film of the age, Forever Amber, based on the historical romance by Kathleen Winsor. In 1946 she began filming the part of Amber St Clare, a young beauty making her way in 17th-century England, shooting opposite Vincent Price as Almsbury. Hundreds of stills were shot of her in period costume. But then the director was sacked, filming started all over again – and Cummins was replaced (as was Price).

A career that had promised so much for Cummins was reduced to small parts in big films and big parts in small pictures. Among these, her best known performance was in Gun Crazy (1950), directed by Joseph H Lewis,...

By Jeremy Carr

There is an immediate appeal in the very premise of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), a curiosity that stems from how exactly this story will play out and how the Master of Suspense is going to keep the narrative taut and technically stimulating. It was a gimmick he would repeat with Rope (1948), Dial M for Murder (1954), and Rear Window (1954), similar films where the drama is contained to a single setting. But here, the approach is amplified by having the entirety of its plot limited to the eponymous lifeboat, an extremely confined location that is at once anxiously restricting and, at the same time, placed in a vast expanse of threatening openness.

Following a German U-boat attack that sinks an allied freighter and creates the cramped, confrontational condition, a cast of nine diverse, necessarily distinctive characters are steadily assembled aboard the small vessel (and their variety is indeed necessary...

When Alfred Hitchcock films are praised, this 1944 picture tends to get overlooked. Yet it hooks and holds audiences as strongly as any of the Master’s classics. When a handful of English and Americans are lost at sea, survival depends on their ability to cooperate. Can they trust the experienced sea captain — a German — who joins them? And when things become grim, will their behavior be any better than his?

Lifeboat

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1944 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 96 min. /Street Date March 21, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, Walter Slezak, Mary Anderson, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Heather Angel, Hume Cronyn, Canada Lee

Cinematography: Glen MacWilliams

Art Direction: James Basevi, Maurice Ransford

Film Editor: Dorothy Spencer

Original Music: Hugo W. Friedhofer

Written by: Jo Swerling, story by John Steinbeck

Produced by Kenneth Macgowan

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Hitchcock goes to war, this time for 20th...

The Audubon Society battles plumage poachers in the Everglades, circa 1900. Legendary director Nicholas Ray suffered an on-location meltdown filming this early ecologically sensitive epic, but the finished product is still one of his better pictures. Burl Ives, Christopher Plummer and Chana Eden give top 'Ray' performances. The eccentric supporting cast includes Peter Falk, boxer Two-Ton Tony Galento and none other than the real Gypsy Rose Lee. Wind Across the Everglades DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1958 / Color / 1:85 enhanced widescreen / 93 min. / Street Date October 6 2015, 2016 / available through the WBshop / 21.99 Starring Burl Ives, Christopher Plummer, Gypsy Rose Lee, George Voskovec, Tony Galento, Howard Smith, Emmett Kelly, Pat Henning, Chana Eden, Curt Conway, Peter Falk, Sammy Renick, Cory Osceola, MacKinlay Kantor, Totch Brown, George Voskovec, Sumner Williams. Cinematography Joseph Brun Film Editor Georges Klotz, Joseph Zigman Art Direction Richard Sylbert Original Music Paul Sawtell & Bert Shefter Written by Budd Schulberg Produced by Stuart Schulberg...

Teresa Wright in 'Shadow of a Doubt': Alfred Hitchcock heroine (image: Joseph Cotten about to strangle Teresa Wright in 'Shadow of a Doubt') (See preceding article: "Teresa Wright Movies: Actress Made Oscar History.") After scoring with The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, and The Pride of the Yankees, Teresa Wright was loaned to Universal – once initial choices Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland became unavailable – to play the small-town heroine in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. (Check out video below: Teresa Wright reminiscing about the making of Shadow of a Doubt.) Co-written by Thornton Wilder, whose Our Town had provided Wright with her first chance on Broadway and who had suggested her to Hitchcock; Meet Me in St. Louis and Junior Miss author Sally Benson; and Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville, Shadow of a Doubt was based on "Uncle Charlie," a story outline by Gordon McDonell – itself based on actual events.

Looking back at 2012 on what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2012—in theaters or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2012 to create a unique double feature.

All the contributors were asked to write a paragraph explaining their 2012 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch in that perfect world we know doesn't exist but can keep dreaming of every time we go to the movies.

How would you program some...

Gun Crazy (also known as Deadly is the Female)

Directed by Joseph H. Lewis

Written by MacKinlay Kantor, Dalton Trumbo and co.

U.S.A., 1950

An argument can be made that almost every movie made is, in some fashion or another, about obsession. Individuals are always obsessing over some things, namely their top interests. However stimulating and healthy some might be, several others carry the potential to be downright vile. The 1950, Joseph H. Lewis directed Gun Crazy, as the title suggests, is very clearly about an obsession, unsubtly so in fact. Loving guns might, might, make one a police officer, or a guard, or a marine, or any field in which guns are, let us say, put to good use, sort of. Being so fascinated with fire arms is a double-edged sword, mind you. The tool’s predominant utility is to kill, after all. With such dire consequences linked with the weapon,...