Popular reviews

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★★ 7

  "I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

  of course, but so many other immortal lines here. one of the rawest films the studio system ever produced.

  Scenes from a Noir Marriage

  or as Netflix might categorize it: "existential romance"

  this is what we talk about when we talk about Bogart.

  poor Ray & Grahame... i thought those crazy kids were gonna make it.

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  Review by trolleyfreak ★★★★★ 62

  5 Reasons why this film is a masterpiece:

  1. It's the best film Nicholas Ray ever made; a noir-tinged drama rendered in dark visuals of exhilarating beauty.

  2. It showcases probably the greatest performance of Bogie's career as the short-fused screenwriter Dix Steele, a character he imbues with a neurotic edge that is frightening in its intensity.

  3. This dialogue: 'I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me'.

  4. Gloria Grahame is in it.

  5. It just is, OK?!

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★★ 4

  A paranoid phantasmagoria of broken people, shattered Hollywood dreams, violent American character, Bogart and Grahame personals, New Deal and shifting political space of the era, romantic longing cut short. One of the most perfect bad trip movies, probably because it is also one of the most romantic.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 2

  "The act of a sick mind with the urge to destroy something young and lovely."

  Perhaps the most brutal and devastating hollywood break-up film, simultaneously an ostensible murder mystery noir where the answer doesn't bring any relief only more pain and a romance melodrama poisoned with paranoia, violence and self-loathing. A filmmaker and a killer become one and the same because both carry the impulse to take what's in their imagination and bring it into the real, tangible world.

  Full discussion on ep 250 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by karen h. ★★★★★ 2

  "A good love scene should be about something else besides love. For instance, this one. Me fixing grapefruit. You sitting over there, dopey, half-asleep. Anyone looking at us could tell we're in love."

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★½ 4

  I've never seen Bogie become such a scary dude

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★ 1

  1950. Two genre-defining noirs follow Hollywood's postwar darkness to its logical conclusion by setting their stories among Tinseltown's decayed soul. Sunset Boulevard is one of Billy Wilder's expertly crafted closed loops, a vision of Hollywood as an empire not merely in decline but founded upon an ideal of constant obsolescence, locking its brightest luminaries into grotesqueries of opulent rot as fame left with age. Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, however, is open-ended, going so far as to abandon its original tidy, if nasty, coda in favor of a grim ambiguity that suggests cycles broken into new and even more terrifying iterations.

  Ray films Hollywood not from its rotten core but its desiccated, metaphorical outskirts. It gets underway in a…

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  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★★ 1

  Bogart grabs Grahme by the neck to confess his love. He is vulnerable in his eyes, but violent by his hands.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 10

  "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

  It's really too bad that every review ever has to open with this quotation, because the rest of the script is exactly as sharp and snappy as this most famous line, but it really is the perfect encapsulation of the film (inasmuch as any film can be captured in 22 words). It's not just one of those quotes that fits within the context of the film—for example, "You're a popcorn salesman." is a great line because of what it means to the characters and the way Humphrey Bogart delivers it, but without already knowing these characters or seeing…

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  Review by nickusen 2

  classic hollywood noirs are great because pretty much all of them only have four characters trying to solve a confusing crime by smoking in a handful of sets, and all of them own incredibly hard

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  Review by cuckoochanel ★★★★★ 23

  I’ve always considered myself more of a Mildred Atkinson than a Laurel Gray—perky, opinionated, and perhaps a bit too earnest. And like Mildred (and Laurel, as it seems), I have an unfortunate knack for finding trouble (ranging from uncommonly bad luck to serious danger); nothing as calamitous as the peril Mildred experienced, but one could say instead of trekking to the taxi stand, I found myself involved with my own Dixon Steele.

  Other than Mildred’s innocently effervescent humor, particularly the scene at Dix’s Beverly Hills apartment (in a refreshing, yet brief turn by Martha Stewart), the jokes in In a Lonely Place are imbued with sarcasm and sinister mirth, much like the story’s central figure, screenwriter Dixon Steele (an immortal…

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  Review by Adam Friedland 10

  Watched last week and forgot to add, looked at my phone a lot but got the gist