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During the 1940s and 1950s, film noir was one of the most popular Hollywood movie forms. With its roots in both German Expressionism and the American hard-boiled detective fiction of the '20s and '30s, film noir caught on with a public in search o...

Billy Wilder, one of the titans of cinema during the 1940s and 1950s, won his first Best Director Oscar for 1945's The Lost Weekend (he would go on to win another for 1960's The Apartment). Over a span of 21 years beginning in 1940 and concluding ...

Rio Bravo, the acclaimed 1959 Howard Hawks Western, showcases a perfectly-cast John Wayne in the kind of role he defined during his four-plus decades of appearing before the camera. Although aspects of the movie have a dated feel when viewed l...

Indulge me for a moment as I time travel back to 1980. Historically, it was a signficant year -- the Iran hostage crisis raged, Ronald Reagan won the Presidential election, and the United States boycotted the Moscow Summer Olympics in response...

For three years, we waited. As bits of news filtered through the Hollywood grapevine into the trade papers and Starlog, we gobbled them up. Still, by early 1980, not much was known about Star Wars 2 (officially retitled The Empire Strikes Back by the...

1950 was a very good year for movies that took a look behind the showbiz scene. Both Sunset Blvd. (films) and All About Eve (theater) collected their share of Oscar nominations, with Eve beating out Sunset in the key Best Picture category. Howeve...