It's good to have a fifth volume of Warner Home Video's Film Noir Classics Collection, and here's hoping for more. Accept that we're past the point when masterpieces such as Gun Crazy, Out of the Past, and The Asphalt Jungle are going to turn up in collections...

Sony/Columbia comes late to the business of boxing classic noirs, but their first foray is a winner. The crisp restorations fairly pop off the screen, and although two titles tower above the other three, every one rates as a must-see...

Return to the realm of smoke and shadows for Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II, five largely overlooked stories of doomed heroes and double-dealing ladies, featuring the likes of Kim Novak, Fred MacMurray, Glenn Ford, Anne Bancroft, and legendary femme fatale Gloria Grahame, and each making their DVD debut...

Generously includes film stills and essays on crime films, The Postman Always Rings Twice, "Hitchcock's Noir Landscape," "Samuel Fuller's Tabloid Cinema," "Son of Noir," "Noir Science," "Girl Power: Female Centered Neo-Noir," and "Abstract Expressionism and Film Noir...

The femme fatale is front and center in volume 1 of Bad Girls of Film Noir, a quartet of low-budget, Truman-era crime movies from the Columbia vaults. Evelyn Keyes is the most extreme example of deadly female in 1951's The Killer That Stalks New York; she's a smuggler and unwitting carrier of smallpox who passes the disease to the innocent and unscrupulous alike...

Though this series is devoted to the Bad Girls of Film Noir, volume 2 is mostly a tribute to one dangerous female in particular--cult favorite Cleo Moore, whose sultry charms were put to fine use in thrillers like On Dangerous Ground (and lesser films) throughout the 1950s...

Film noir is such a rich cinematic zone that second-tier specimens compel nearly as much fascination as the classics. At a glance, Volume 2 of Warner Bros.' (ever-expanding, we hope) Film Noir Collection is a distinct step down from Volume 1--inevitable when you've launched your series with five landmark titles, including three outright noir masterpieces (The Asphalt Jungle, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past)...

Some boxed sets claim to be definitive, but are haphazardly selected. Not this one. Four of the five titles here can legitimately lay claim to being essentials in the film noir canon, and the fifth, The Set-Up, is a terrific boxing picture with a strong noir atmosphere...

"Yes, I killed him. I killed him for the money and for a woman. I didn't get the money, and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it?" -- Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, 1944 An examination of 'classic' film noir (1940-59) which explores its contexts of production and reception, its visual style, narrative patterns and themes and character development...

Road House has acquired a cult as a prime film noir. Certainly the title location is archetypal, a lounge and bowling alley up toward the Canadian border, and Ida Lupino and Richard Widmark make the most of flavorful roles that would qualify them as exemplary noir denizens even if they hadn't established that elsewhere...