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It was more than a little heartening to see Roger Corman paid tribute by Quentin Tarantino at Cannes’ closing night. By now the director-producer-mogul’s imprint on cinema is understood to eclipse, rough estimate, 99.5% of anybody who’s touched the medium, but on a night for celebrating what’s new, trend-following, and manicured it could’ve hardly been more necessary. Thus I’m further heartened seeing the Criterion Channel will host a retrospective of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations running eight films and aptly titled “Grindhouse Gothic,” though I might save the selections for October.

Centerpiece, though, is a hip hop series including Bill Duke’s superb Deep Cover, Ghost Dog, and numerous documentaries––among them Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, making Michael Rapaport a Criterion-approved auteur. Ten films starring Kay Francis and 21 Eurothrillers round out series; streaming premieres include the Dardenne brothers’ Tori and Lokita,...

Depraved convicts ! Crazy Manhattan gin parties! Society dames poaching other women's husbands! A flimflam artist scamming the uptown sophisticates! All these forbidden attractions are here and more -- including Bette Davis's epochal seduction line about impulsive kissing versus good hair care. It's a 9th collection of racy pre-Code wonders. Forbidden Hollywood Volume 9 Big City Blues, Hell's Highway, The Cabin in the Cotton, When Ladies Meet, I Sell Anything DVD-r The Warner Archive Collection 1932-1934 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 63, 62, 78, 85, 70 min. / Street Date October 27, 2015 / available through the WBshop / 40.99 Starring Joan Blondell, Eric Linden, Humphrey Bogart; Richard Dix, Tom Brown; Richard Barthelmess, Bette Davis, Dorothy Jordan, Berton Churchill; Ann Harding, Robert Montgomery, Myrna Loy, Alice Brady, Frank Morgan; Pat O' Brien, Ann Dvorak, Claire Dodd, Roscoe Karns. Cinematography James Van Trees; Edward Cronjager; Barney McGill; Ray June Written by Lillie Hayward, Ward Morehouse, from his play; Samuel Ornitz, Robert Tasker, Rowland Brown...

Each year New York residents can look forward to two essential series programmed at the Film Forum, noirs and pre-Coders (that is, films made before the strict enforcing of the Motion Picture Production Code). These near-annual retrospective traditions are refreshed and re-varied and re-repeated for neophytes and cinephiles alike, giving all the chance to see and see again great film on film. Many titles in this year's Essential Pre-Code series, running an epic July 15 - August 11, are old favorites and some ache to be new discoveries; all in all there are far too many racy, slipshod, patter-filled celluloid splendors to be covered by one critic alone. Faced with such a bounty, I've enlisted the kind help of some friends and colleagues, asking them to sent in short pieces on their favorites in an incomplete but also in-progress survey and guide to one of the summer's most sought-after series. In this entry: what's playing Friday,...

Above: Richard Dix in Hell's Highway.

Rowland Brown (born with the appealing first name of Chauncey), was an interesting, almost unique filmmaker of the early thirties, who made three films. In those days, when it was a matter of principle that directors should not write, nor writers direct, and that writers, in Preston Sturges' words, "should work in teams, like piano movers," Brown was an honest-to-God hyphenate, writing and directing three two-fisted pre-code thrillers, Quick Millions, Hell's Highwayand Blood Money.

There was Chaplin, of course, a living exception to nearly every industrial practice of the age, but Brown's entire directing career occurred during the lull between City Lights and Modern Times. Brown wrote (albeit sometimes with collaborators) and directed, and his films have a strong sense of their maker's personality: tough, even brutish, with a hard-bitten and cynical sense of humor, and a frankness about human nature and sexual foibles,...

Leave it to The Daily Beast to get Scorsese talking about films. Not that it would be hard to do. The man is “Mr. Cinema.” He directs, produces and he even has his own nonprofit organization for preserving classic films, The Film Foundation. The director may have toyed with other genres during his lifetime, but the one people would discuss aplenty is his contributions to crime cinema. To think of Scorsese is to think of Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed, despite also directing films like After Hours and The Last Temptation of Christ. As he turns his attention to the small screen with HBO’s Boardwalk Empire – touted as being the network’s costliest production to date – the director lists off his 15 favorite gangster movies. Scorsese writes:

“Here are 15 gangster pictures that had a profound effect on me and the way I thought about crime and how to portray it on film.