Film noir, as we know it today, is less a genre than a vibe. The term, coined well after the genre’s heyday by French film critics, refers to a certain blackhearted mode of Hollywood filmmaking defined by doomed protagonists, labyrinthine plots, expressionistic shadows and, more often than not, the alluring femme fatale. It is this last signifier that unites this year’s Noir City Boston, the annual repertory program curated by the Film Noir Foundation that touches down at The Brattle Theatre from Friday through Monday. Subtitled “Dark City Dames,” the series gathers nearly a dozen titles from the classic to the obscure featuring devious gangster molls, hardboiled female detectives and other distaff denizens of the noir netherworld, with all screenings through Sunday introduced by the FNF’s Foster Hirsch.
The series kicks off with a bona fide classic of the genre, Jacques Tourneur’s “Out of the Past” (1947), which screens on 35 mm Friday in a double feature with Edward Dmytryk’s “Murder, My Sweet” (1944). “Out of the Past” is remembered primarily for Robert Mitchum’s performance as a morally ambiguous private eye, but the film wouldn’t work nearly as well as it does without Jane Greer’s all-timer of a femme fatale; when Greer looks into Mitchum’s eyes in a Mexico City dive bar, we fully understand why Mitchum instantly double crosses the mob boss who hired him (a chillingly genial Kirk Douglas) to find her.
Saturday’s highlight is the deliriously dark women-in-prison melodrama “Caged!” (1950), which is paired with Richard Fleischer’s “The Narrow Margin” (1952). Though remembered today primarily as the answer to a trivia question – star Eleanor Parker was the fifth-place finisher in the notoriously competitive 1950 Best Actress race – “Caged!” is a jaw-dropping piece of work, blatantly queer-coded with an astounding performance by Hope Emerson as the outrageously butch warden. Sunday’s “99 River Street” (1953) features a more typically macho noir protagonist in John Payne’s prizefighter-turned-cabbie, but it features not one but two femmes fatales: Peggie Castle as Payne’s duplicitous wife and Evelyn Keyes as the spunky small-time actress who gets him both in and out of trouble. (“River Street” is paired with a true curiosity in “My True Story,” the 1951 directorial debut of Mickey Rooney!) The series closes Monday with a new 4K restoration of Robert Siodmak’s “Phantom Lady” (1944), which flips the script: Its male protagonist’s spitfire secretary (Ella Raines) becomes the detective in her own right to clear her boss of a murder charge. Classic Hollywood was seen frequently as a man’s world, but in film noir it was often women who truly called the shots.
Father’s Day is this weekend, and this year The Brattle complements its annual Mother’s Day screening of “Psycho” (1960) with an equally monstrous cinematic father figure. Strictly speaking, I suppose The Brattle’s reasons for screening “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) on Saturday and Sunday constitute a significant spoiler, so if you’re one of the few who have not yet seen the second entry in the “Star Wars” saga, you may want to skip to the next paragraph now. To everyone else, the sequel’s big reveal – that true-blue galactic hero Luke Skywalker is in fact the son of series big-bad Darth Vader – is not only one of the all-time great plot twists, but a worst-case scenario for those who believe in heredity. We would go on to explore, both in the trilogy-capper “Return of the Jedi” (1983) and in George Lucas’ later prequel films, the complicated psychology underneath that famous black helmet, but taken on its own, “Empire” is a portrait of a very bad dad indeed, making it prime Father’s Day viewing even for those with complicated relationships with their own parentage.
It is an understatement that Pride Month is particularly complicated in 2025, with corporations left and right throwing years of virtue-signaling in the dumpster to curry favor with the current regime. It is fitting, then, that a pair of films screen this week dealing with the more complicated aspects of queer life. As part of its ongoing Pride Month iteration of its Retro Replay series, the Landmark Kendall Square Cinema on Tuesday screens Lisa Cholodenko’s wistful comedy “The Kids Are All Right” (2010), in which the world of lesbian couple Annette Bening and Julianne Moore is rocked when their children decide to make contact with their previously anonymous sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo). Then, on Wednesday, The Brattle, in association with Strictly Brohibited, presents Desiree Akhavan’s coming-of-age drama “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” (2018), starring Chloë Grace Moretz as a ’90s teenager forced into a conversion therapy summer camp. While neither film shies from the difficulties faced by LGBTQ+ Americans, both present warm and ultimately human portraits of their characters. They are, as the saying goes, here – despite the best efforts of those who refuse to get used to it.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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