Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

#28 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Courtroom dramas have limited appeal to me. They largely feel fake with artificial drama that would never actually happen in the setting. Sometimes a film can get past that, as in Fury, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt actually ends up getting close. The drama isn't supposed to…

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While the City Sleeps

#33 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. I feel like there are two opposing and competing movies within the bounds of While the City Sleeps. The first is obvious from the opening prologue where we watch a woman killed by an invader into her apartment. The second is a look at the sausage-making of…

Moonfleet

#37 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. Sometimes you see an entry on a list that boggles the mind. There's no accounting for taste, for sure, but when I read that Cahiers du Cinema placed Fritz Lang's Moonfleet at number thirty-two on its list of greatest films of all time I was simply confounded.…

Human Desire

#8 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. I'm going to come to Human Desire's defense. The second cinematic adaptation of Emile Zola's La Bete Humaine (the first was by Jean Renoir, another very good film in its own right), is a noir that Fritz Lang imbued with his wonderful visual style, but he never…

Some extra thoughts on The Big Heat

#2 in my ranking of Fritz Lang's filmography. It's always interesting to revisit a film I've seen a long time ago, where I had written specific thoughts on it, while seeing it outside of the context of the director's body of work only to return to it within that very context years later. You really…