"He’s backsliding. Falling into old, bad habits. And he has to admit, he more than kind of loves it. It’s almost as if, during these last three months—the sobriety, the no smoking, the celibacy—he was pulling undercover duty again. Except this time, the role he'd been playing was the version of himself the rest of the world wanted him to be."
Alongside the hypnotic score composed by writer/director/editor Ivan Sen, images from the 1850s Australian gold rush flash across the screen. The score soars, using tryptic note patterns, ascending and descending; the beginning, middle, and end are storytelling scales, approximating the film's circadian rhythms. Fade to black. A title card: Goldstone.
Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang isn’t a detective movie, though there are detectives, missing corpses, executive-level intrigue, and moonlit kidnappings—the starter kit for hard-boiled noir.
If Godard’s Alphaville had been heavy-handed in 1965, its dystopian future, ruled over by a genocidal computer, feels oppressive and inescapable now.
Blade Runner 2049 gently pried away my questions and showed me there is another way to watch movies. But it wasn’t until The Matrix Resurrections that I realized not all question-setting-aside is satisfactory.
Exemplified by films like Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan (1998), hillbilly noir grapples with stereotypes and clichés about white working-class rural America, twisting these familiar images in order to dismantle romanticized views of the nation’s heartland.
Detective stories, mysteries, policíers, crime tales, romans durs—stuff that typically constitutes a film noir—are all deeply interested in the gradual accumulation of facts. Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line is a mystery story—but one that’s already done. Call it documentary noir.
Is Carl Franklin's Out of Time an overlooked neo-noir gem, or just another B-is-for-bargain-bin movie?








