Popular reviews

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★½ 1

  Family meets the seedy underworld in Max Ophüls' moody film noir that sees Joan Bennett's routine middle class existence shattered when she decides to hide the body of a man she believes her daughter has accidently killed. This one is notable because it's very female centric - and not the usual noir trope of a femme fatale; here our central character's maternal instinct that drives the narrative. The focus is always on the central characters rather than any lurid details of the plot, and the central characters are well drawn and convincing, and this helps to instill the idea of criminality invading family life, similar to other genre films such as Shadow a Doubt. The central villain played by James…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★½ 9

  “The Reckless Moment” was director Max Ophüls’ last American film, and from its quality in comparison to his other output... he made it back to his safe European home just in time. 

  “Moment” is a partner piece to Ophüls’ other noir made-in-exile, “Caught.” Both feature actor James Mason (himself an American émigrée from Britain), and examine tainted aspects of the so-called American dream. 

  “Caught” focused on vampiric materialism, which sucked the soul of a young women nearly dry. “Moment” considers the essential Western ideal of children striving to live a better life than their parents, at any cost — usually to the parents themselves. 

  Ophüls’ twist on the idea of protective parenting is that it is a mother that goes…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

  Stylistically sharp, The Reckless Moment is possibly the most underrated entry in Max Ophüls' filmography. The German-born filmmaker successfully assigns distinctive qualities of film noir imagery and designs into a tautly claustrophobic drama. It was the last of four movies that he finished in the course of his Hollywood period in the nineteen forties, which additionally encompassed the magnificent Letter from an Unknown Woman.

  It's a charming movie, albeit tainted with some slight weaknesses in some of its characterisation's. Still, its manipulation of silhouettes, extraordinary camera angles, and intense lighting entrusts the film with atmosphere and individuality. It paints an ominous and sarcastic portrait of American society where a determined woman is characterised by her mental suffering and eventually is overwhelmingly disappointed with the smothering limitations of her social environment.

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  Review by Steve G 🇵🇸 🇾🇪 ★★½ 2

  A disappointing end to what has been an unexpectedly mixed bag of a run of noirs.

  Perhaps the main problem with The Reckless Moment is that the reckless moment in question isn't actually all that reckless, and there is nothing else in this dull noir that would even come close to being classified as reckless.

  James Mason only pops in once the film is half an hour long but even by this stage the film has rushed through the early stages of the main plot and his character isn't given nearly enough time to be properly characterised. As such, the often seen 1940s plot point of someone falling in love in next to no time is even more rushed and…

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  Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★½

  Se eu tivesse que dar um desses cursos por internet e fosse forçado a montar só esse curso e mais nenhum outro, ele se chamaria "american materialist crime film" e seria composto por este filme, They Live by Night, Thieves’ Highway, The Prowler, Force of Evil, The Sound of Fury, Where the Sidewalk Ends, He Ran All the Way, Clash by Night, Violent Saturday, City of Fear, Underworld U.S.A. e o que mais se aparenta a eles.

  A coisa que se notaria quase que imediatamente ao se assistir dois ou três desses títulos, e mais ainda ao se assistir todos, é que filmes podem ser marxistas ou progressistas sem com isso serem positivos e auspiciosos nas expectativas que depositam no…

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  Review by Millie ★★★★

  female centred noir >>>

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  Review by Owen ★★★★ 1

  Joan Bennett's young mother and house wife risks everything to save her teenage daughter from her lover and ends up getting blackmailed for her troubles.

  The story is almost archetypically noir and is elevated by Ophuls, Mason and most especially Bennett into a movie that seems to want to take on class and conformity and the role of women and all sorts of stuff. It's not as flashy as Ophuls Belle Epoque stuff but it's still Ophuls, it is gorgeously put together and, in his final American film, he seems to have something he wants to get off his chest about post-war american society.

  Ok James Mason being lectured on being too low class to ever have a chance in…

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  Review by Justin Decloux ★★★★

  It's never good when your 17-year old daughter's scumbag boyfriend ends up dead and you're forced to cover it up, run a household, and be smitten by James Mason.

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  Review by Zoë 🐝 ★★★

  *puts a microphone extremely close to my mouth* why did they have James Mason attempt an Irish accent. he can’t do it

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★

  Prime Noir of the 1940's: Screening #1

  Gender-swapped lady-noir.

  Dedicated housewife Lucia Harper wants her young daughter Bea to stay away from the older man she's been seeing, but her efforts are in vain. One night, Bea comes home late, distraught over something she doesn't want to talk about. Lucia goes out and finds the dead body of the old man, and for her daughter's sake she decides to hide the corpse at the bottom of a lake. But when a mysterious man shows up with love letter between her daughter and the victim, all her worries come flooding back.

  The Reckless Moment is fascinating to consider in relation to the noir figure of the femme fatale. The leading lady…

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  Review by KYK ★★★★ 4

  give it up for mothers y'all. joan bennett does a LOT in ophuls' final english-language film. her husband is away and so she's sorta left alone to raise their rebellious 17-year-old daughter, who is going out with a shady older guy... then she has to cover up a crime, is blackmailed, all while her pre-teen son is running around shirtless with a full six-pack talkin' like a middle-aged man smh.

  35mm. Metrograph.

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  Review by Raphael Georg Klopper ★★★★½

  Now that’s more a fitting and worthy named Noir movie, and from Max Ophüls of all people! Well, guys like Fritz Lang also spend more than half of his American time making what’s now considered B Noir classics, among other genres (now imagine Ophüls making a Western…huh), so it was only inevitable that in his short and limited run in U.S. soil, the other German giant would’ve done the same. But if back in his previous Caught, Ophüls just merely danced around with some of the tropes of the genre, intercalated between the woman’s tragedy melodrama, usual from his storytelling template; here, he goes into a full deep dive into a Noir dynamic.

  The slight glimpses of the criminal underworld…