For this section, I want to look at neo-noir films I think are essential to understanding the genre as a whole. I didn't include many new ones—for those you'll have to look at the list I'll add below. But let's go over what I deem to be the 10 best neo-noir films ever made. It has one of the coolest intercut tracking shots in film history and tells the story of a man just trying to get the money he's owed after his wife and friend betray him.
More on the contemporary side, I also love Rian Johnson's Brick. This movie takes the old-timey speak and then adds it to a contemporary high school, where people are trying to figure out what happened to a classmate.
I'm also a huge fan of Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat. It is a riff on Double Indemnity and uses the erotic thriller genre to expand on older tropes, allowing the audience to feel sleazy in the best way. It is his pastiche of Hitchcock homages, which features the underbelly of Los Angeles film production. Sort of a play on the movies that would come before and after.
Many great filmmakers get their start in this genre too. The Coen brothers gave us Blood Simple , which also introduced us to Frances McDormand as she played someone trying to get rid of her husband.
It also has a darkly hilarious death scene with a shovel. Curtis Hanson delivered his masterpiece, L. Confidential, in the mids, seemingly reviving the genre once again. It gazed back at Hollywood and its superficiality and fame obsessions. I also can't write this list without mentioning Blade Runner , a movie that took neo-noir into the future, tracking a detective hunting robots. This showed how flexible the genre could be and how filmmakers could truly make it their own.
Still, s hits like Chinatown also bolstered the roots of the genre as well, showing that the past was also fruitful to talk about the problems of today; greed, aristocracy, and violence. The Long Goodbye is the rare neo-noir that is set in that movie's present, dealing with someone who goes missing again. Robert Altman was able to keep his auteur sensibilities inside the story and still have an entry that is considered one of the best all-time neo-noirs.
Unlike noir films, the neo-noir films made use of modern technology that was unknown to noir films. Unlike noir films, neo-noir films also made use of the modern circumstances. Neo-noir films developed because of certain social attitudes. It can be seen that noir films made the audiences to build a relationship with the anti-heroes. But this was often revised in neo-noir films. In the neo-noir films, one can come across unconventional camera movements. The plot was framed in such a way that the audience feels that they are just watching films and not taking part in the actions or story like in noir films.
Some of the themes that are seen in neo-noir films include identity crises, subjectivity, technology, social ramifications, and memory issues. The characters in noir films were often depicted as anti-heroes who had to face difficult situations. Strange Days is a manic, sensory experience, which makes sense given its preoccupations with tackling a wide range of harrowing subject matters, including voyeurism, rape, and racial strife.
The only way this film could be better is if Angela Bassett — whose tender, tough performance gives it pathos — were the lead.
Most intriguing is how Franklin reimagines Los Angeles, interrogating the racial landscape and existential unease from the perspective of the sort of black characters that predominantly colored the margins of the genre in decades past.
Bound is one of the few neo-noirs that understands the desire that develops between women, for women. Or maybe I just have a bit of crush on Corky Gina Gershon , the butch ex-con who starts an affair with Violet Jennifer Tilly , who is struggling with the narrow boxes the men in her orbit have created for her, including her abusive, Mafia-connected boyfriend, Caesar Joe Pantoliano.
The relationship between Corky and Violet teases new dimensions out of both women, making this neo-noir so memorable. Jackie Brown is the only Quentin Tarantino film I truly, deeply love. As the titular Jackie Brown, Pam Grier is the crown jewel in his oeuvre. Jackson to make ends meet. The film is colored by sharply constructed performances from Forster, Bridget Fonda, and Robert De Niro, as well as a killer soundtrack, taut direction, a heap of charm, and an undertow of menace.
Grier is the best part of a film already marked by greatness. Perhaps it was his sunshine-bright good looks, or the easygoing way he moved through the world, which is antithetical to the ragged paranoia that holds the heart of so many men in this genre. No American actor has communicated the ease Newman does before the camera, which he shows here playing Harry Ross, a retired detective struggling with aging and trying to piece the wreckage of his life into something meaningful.
But trying to pin down his work to any single genre feels like a futile exercise. Is Mulholland Drive a noir with elements of horror, or vice versa? Does it matter? It travels into strange corners and vignettes, but the heart of the film concerns the relationship between aspiring actress Betty Naomi Watts and an amnesiac Laura Elena Harring who adopts the name Rita after looking at a poster for the noir Gilda , starring Rita Hayworth.
Lynch fully embraces the surreal qualities that have touched noir since the beginning with his use of sound, nonlinear narrative, the visual landscape, and the way he plays on identity, as characters seem to merge and splinter.
Michael Mann has made a career out of slickly produced noirs dealing with the travails of toxic masculinity. When I was writing this list, I knew I wanted to mention one of his films, but given the length and grace of his career, it was hard to choose.
What about the neon hell of Thief? I settled on Collateral perhaps because it is the film of his I return to most often, due to the sincere pleasure I find in watching it. There are certain films that are designed to haunt. They slip under your skin, grab hold of your heart, and never let go. Lust, Caution is one of them, a film defined by both splendor and aching tragedy.
Lust, Caution takes its time to tease out the particulars of the affair at its heart, between Mr. Mai a revelatory Tang Wei. Each frame is gorgeous, colored by the allure of this landscape, the fine clothing, and the shifting identities of the two leads. Noir is nothing without women. This Bong Joon-ho—helmed film centers on an unnamed widow a tremendous Kim Hye-ja who is fiercely protective of her teenage son, Yoon Do-joon Won Bin , who has an intellectual disability.
Mother echoes an earlier noir, the s Joan Crawford vehicle Mildred Pierce , in its keen-eyed understanding of the warping abilities of obsessive love between a mother and child, even in the cold face of reality. Is it the carefully structured mystery at its center, about a wayward husband, Nick Dunne Ben Affleck, seemingly in the role he was born to play , suspected for the disappearance and possible murder of his picture-perfect wife, Amy Rosamund Pike?
Is it the assured handling of tone, morose mood, and pulp sensibilities that Fincher and his collaborators coax out of this story? She is the synthesization of two kinds of women that have populated noir since its beginnings: the angelic emblem society expects in women, and the dastardly femme fatale.
Amy is both a frustrating and awe-inspiring character for the lengths she goes to for vengeance. With icy malevolence and practiced charisma, Pike brings to life my favorite femme fatale of the modern age. Film noir is a style of film-making that is used to mainly describe Hollywood crime dramas from the early s to the late s. These crime dramas usually have a low-key black-and-white chiaroscuro style.
Chiaroscuro is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark. The term film noir is French for "black film.
The techniques employed in the film noir style are reminiscing of German Expressionist cinematography. The screen is visually darker than the average film, with long deep shadows. This was a contrast to the usual light bright documentary-styled camera work often employed in movies.
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