Author Alexia Kannas

“It happened right there,” Nora says to her new friend Laura, pointing with her eyes to the place where, on her first night in Rome, she witnessed a brutal murder. “How could that be?” Laura responds nonchalant...

In an essay about the many ways Hollywood cinema has imagined California, Dana Polan tries to remember the cartoon that shaped his childhood vision of the state as “pure sunshine, a land of beautiful and resple...

Rita (Laura Harring), the femme fatale with amnesia, wakes in the night having remembered something: “Go with me somewhere,” she whispers to her lover, Betty (Naomi Watts). It’s around two o’clock in the mornin...

Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949) stands as one of the most bleakly romantic and fatalistic films noir of the classical era. In it, Burt Lancaster plays Steve Thompson, an armoured-car driver who comes home t...

Existential Dread and the Smell of Boiling Rice: A Love Letter to Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967) Hanada Goro (Shishido Joe), Tokyo’s “No. 3 assassin”, walks into a bar; his wife orders a double black la...

In the final shot of Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, 1975), the amateur detective/jazz pianist Marcus Daly (David Hemmings) stares icily at his own reflection in a pool of still-warm blood. The killer...

What is an Italian giallo film? Mikel J. Koven’s latest book La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film attempts to illuminate this under-appreciated cultural phenomenon and is in fact the fi...