The Big Sleep (movie)

Before Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled L.A. detective Philip Marlowe and his vivid literary prose caught the public's attention, before Billy Wilder's towering position as one of Hollywood's greatest writer-directors, there was a James M. Cain novel...

When it comes to old films, Robert Osborne is hard to stump. But this time he had to consult his notes. "Hold on, it's so obscure, even I don't remember the name of it," said Osborne, who has served as the main on-air host of Turner Classic Movies for...

Michael Winner, a British film director who specialized in thrillers and action movies, including three "Death Wish" movies, died Monday. He was 77. A bon vivant who became a restaurant critic after his film career wound down, Winner died at his...

It's hard to resist Los Angeles-based films noir -- "Chinatown," "Kiss Me Deadly," "The Big Sleep" being only a few of the best -- but "Gangster Squad" is a bit more resistible than most. Director Ruben Fleischer and screenwriter Will Beall have morphed...

-------------------- The Twenty-Year Death A Novel Ariel S. Winter Hard Case Crime: 672 pp., $25.99 -------------------- Noir is, first and foremost, style. It's like kabuki, or, more to the point, the blues — a folk art defined by its...

COSTA MESA — Where else could the Lebowski Fest have started but in a bowling alley? The movement that hero worships His Dudeness and All Things Dude took root 10 years ago, not in the Golden State but in the Bluegrass State. In October 2001,...