A newsletter about narrative, creativity and our fracturing reality

What I appreciate about Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani (Let The Corpses Tan, The Strange Colour Of Your Body’s Tears) as filmmakers is that they are fetishists. Drawing upon memories of genre cinema - a gesture, a moment, a flourish - and not simply re-creating them, but deconstructing and exploding them. With Reflection in a Dead Diamond…

Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani are French writers and directors based in Belgium. They have made four films together: Amer, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, Let the Corpses Tan, and now the v...

Look, I always knew about The Hot Spot (1990) because of an adolescent crush on Jennifer Connelly. A neo-noir directed by Dennis Hopper was also an alluring proposition, Don Johnson in the lead as an opportunistic drifter in a small Texan town, caught between two archetypical babes, the girl next door (Connelly) and the southern belle vamp (Virginia Madsen). Hopper was originally supposed to be making a film from a Mike Figgis script, but ditched that to settle upon an older screenplay adaptation he found of a 1953 novel by Charles William, …

I only watched Jaques Demy’s Model Shop when Quentin Tarantino programmed it as part of a retrospective that was shown on SBS, as it was a clear influence on Once Upon A Time In Hollywood as a ‘Driving around LA’ movie. In Once Upon A Time, it’s about a cool guy driving around L.A. while the spectre of murderers and serial killers lingers on the fringes in the form of the Manson Family.

Welcome to the Curb. We are an independent, ad-free, reader-supported publication. Published from Boorloo, Western Australia, with writers based all around the globe, the Curb brings you film and cu...

There are images in The Big Combo (1955) that are everything you want from a classic Film Noir. Opening with a woman stepping down a darkly lit corridor, backstage to a boxing match, pursued by suited figures. Later, a man in a suit wearing a hat emerges from the fog outside, stepping into a hangar to catch up with his nemesis.

Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron's cyberpunk thriller starring Ralph Fiennes.

For a classic film noir, I settled upon Nightfall (1956) on a whim and the opening moments of Aldo Ray browsing a newspaper stand in the evening, and flinching when the streetlights came on overhead, that hooked me in. The city lights turn on and the title card appears with the woozy theme song. There’s something poetic and observational here, within the prelude to a crime story in Los Angeles.

On paper, Red Rooms is the ideal horror movie for a person like me, which is to say, a coward. It's a bloodless film that is rich with blood.

Well folks, we've entered our Ghost era of the Curb. This is the same old site you've known with the same interviews and reviews and the same passionate support for Australian cinema, just a little d...

Only after I finished watching Yokohama BJ Blues (1982) did I realise that the lead actor, Yusaku Matsuda, played the role of Sato the villain in the Michael Douglas action flick, Black Rain. I knew Matsuda was a Japanese movie star and was known for action films himself in the 1970s, and yet I just didn’t connect him to this shaggy haired blues singer named BJ who makes a living as a private detective, walking around the port town of Yokohama.

“We come to this place… for magic”, to quote our Nicole (Kidman, in the American theatre chain ads for AMC). For Issue 28 of VHS Tracking zine,...