Film Noir

Film directors Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez are the team behind the new film Sin City, based on Miller's graphic novel series of the same name. Miller's Sin City series garnered numerous awards, including the Harvey and the Eisner Awards.

Film critic John Powers reviews the DVD release of Billy Wilder's classic Double Indemnity, starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck.

Welsh actor Matthew Rhys plays the title role in the new HBO series, Perry Mason. His version of the iconic criminal defense attorney is younger and more hardboiled than the one Raymond Burr played in the popular TV show from the '50s and '60s. The new series focuses on Mason as a divorced private investigator in the early 1930s in Los Angeles — before he became a lawyer.

Eddie Muller's book, Dark City, chronicles film noir from the '40s and '50s. "A lot of factors ... go into making something of film noir," he says, including, a "very dark vision of existence."

Del Toro's new movie, Nightmare Alley, is a film noir starring Bradley Cooper as a murderer who joins a traveling carnival, first as part of the crew, and then as part of a clairvoyant act. The Oscar-winning Mexican director talks about researching psychics, his feelings about mortality, and why he relates to Frankenstein's monster. Del Toro also directed The Shape of Water, the Hellboy movies and Pan's Labyrinth.