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Article snippet: It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first two months of the year are desolate times for movie lovers who prefer to gorge on new releases. Once the holiday season’s tidal wave of blockbusters and prestige pictures has receded there’s not much action beyond the awards season itself. Releasing only chaff during the first two months of the year has been a studio tradition so longstanding that nobody seems to remember the rationale. But even for awards mavens, now is a good time to catch up and explore. During the last week of 2017 I was out of New York, visiting relatives, and one evening circumstances left me alone in their house with a few hours to kill. I ended up using my phone to watch “Série Noire,” a grimy 1979 French crime thriller that I saw maybe 20 years ago, via a pretty grimy-in-itself 16 -millimeter print, and had no expectation to see again. Directed by Alain Corneau, the movie is an adaptation of the novel “A Hell of a Woman,” by the American genre writer Jim Thompson. (Mr. Corneau wrote the screenplay with Georges Perec, the French literary genius who wrote “Life: A User’s Manual.”) The story line of “Série Noire” is jaw-droppingly squalid — less than 10 minutes into the movie an abusive aunt is pimping her young niece (Marie Trintignant) to a feckless traveling salesman (Patrick Dewaere) — and the movie’s setting, an impoverished Paris suburb in the depths of a drippy winter, is depicted with such rigor that you suspect the film stock it... Link to the full article to read more