Weekend Movie Forecast: Watchmen Vs. Frenchmen

For one week only, Film Forum is screening John Stahl's 1945 "film noir in color" Leave Her to Heaven, which stars Gene Tierney in an Oscar-nominated performance as the irresistible femme fatale. Time Out NY calls it a "masterpiece of post-WWII American cinema... The glamour of the film’s palette (courtesy of cinematographer Leon Shamroy) is but a bandage on a festering canker, and a late courtroom scene in which Ellen’s former fiancé (Vincent Price) interrogates the film’s surviving parties seems more a Torquemada-like spiritual purge than a crusading search for justice. If God is in the details, he remains tauntingly at the margins: Blue skies never seemed so coldly distant and on-high critical, especially in the deceptively redeeming final shot, one of the few compositions captured, tellingly, from an emphatic low angle."