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Holidays loom, but don’t fear TBS marathons of A Christmas Story. If, like me, you once enacted some good and let studio classics stream on Criterion during family Christmas, you know the trip home will be easier with December’s additions. (People at Criterion: please don’t report me for logging into multiple devices.) As family arrives, drinks are downed, and questions about what you’ve been up to are stumbled through it’ll be nice to stream their “Screwball Comedy Classics” series—25 titles meeting some deep cuts (10 via Venmo if you’ve recently watched It Happens Every Spring).

Personally I’m most excited about the 11 movies in “Snow Westerns,” going as far back as The Secret of Convict Lake, as recently as Ravenous, with the likes of Wellman, Peckinpah, and Corbucci in-between. I personally cannot stand soccer but I appreciate the World Cup giving occasion for a series...

Murder, He Says

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1945 / 1.33:1 / 94 min.

Starring Fred MacMurray, Marjorie Main, Peter Whitney

Cinematography by Theodor Sparkuhl

Directed by George Marshall

The Snopes family were a collection of Southern-fried scoundrels introduced by William Faulkner in 1940’s The Hamlet. Over the course of three novels and several short stories, the clan proved themselves capable of just about any atrocity. They were so comically loathsome they could have been kissing cousins to Mamie, Mert and Bert: the Fleagle family – a slapstick version of the Snopes. Even the local sheriff is terrified of the Fleagles and a greenhorn census taker from the big city is about to find out why.

Fred MacMurray plays Pete Marshall, the eager beaver field man for the Trotter Poll who’s searching for a missing colleague last seen headed toward the Fleagle house, way, way out in the woods (where presumably no one can hear...

1951. Film noir's focus on post-war malaise may be winding down, but Dick Powell, the moon-faced crooner who reinvented himself as a tough guy in Murder, My Sweet, still has one private eye role up the sleeve of his shabby raincoat. But You Never Can Tell is not like other private eye movies.

Beginning with a far-fetched premise—cracker tycoon leaves fortune to dog—Lou Breslow's movie swiftly plunges into full-on derangement, as the dog is reincarnated as a detective and tasked with solving his own murder, assisted by a reincarnated lady horse. Most of what follows is merely agreeably goofy, but the sequence setting up the supernatural premise is so bizarre it should not be shown to anyone under the influence of anything stronger than Kibble.

Experimental cinema was alive and well in 1951. The "special photography" of David S. Horsley, a Brit, gives everything an embossed quality, even the mammoths.