The Lady from Shanghai
Ah, Welles, you really were incredible. Your acting chops may be quite extraordinary, and you certainly had taste in the always lovely Rita Hayworth, but you did some damn fine work in this film with light, shadow, and shot framing. The dark silhouettes in the aquarium, the way the shadows on the ship splay over faces, the incredible shoot out in the fun house, all are quite incredible to watch. And all reinforce that there's a darkness to the characters, that even the hero is a murderer, and that everyone else seems quite mad.
Basically, Welles plays an Irish sailor named Michael O'Hara who helps a beautiful woman in the park and ends up getting a job working on a yacht for her rich lawyer husband. But these people are more than a little depraved and soon enough ask O'Hara to do another job that is a bit more dangerous than running a yacht. It's good film noir.
Crimewave
The Coen brothers wrote a film that was then directed by Sam Raimi. Unfortunately, as awesome as one would think this would turn out, Crimewave was riddled with problems in production, due to an overbearing studio, location problems, and one of the actresses' drug addiction issues. So Crimewave, a slapstick dark comedy/noir film set in the 1940s, failed utterly at the box office, and truth be told, it's just not that great of a film despite the talent of the people behind it. The plot, about a prisoner being sent to the electric chair relating a story about how he's totally innocent, struggled to grab my attention for the first half hour...not a good sign in a movie that's only 78 minutes long.
But it still has some of that Raimi flair, some of that Coen magic, and excellent performances from just about all of the villains: Bruce Campbell as the smarmy and suave heel, and Brion James and Paul Smith as the exterminators. In fact, while I like to watch films with Brion James as a villain, he's typically the heavy. He's totally different in this, almost scrawny next to Smith, and he totally nails his rat-faced character. It's different for him, and I thought he was the best part of the film. And the failure of Crimewave did lead to Evil Dead 2, so...well, I can't totally hate the film.
and so my first thought was 'he beat me to it, that swift little bastard!' And then that ended up being all I could think of when I sat down to write, so in the thought went 
