Veronica Mars and Philip Marlowe share this: the palpable sense that their cynicism exactly stems from their compassion, that their hardness is the scar tissue of a heart they can’t stop the world from breaking over and over.
I avoided both Heat and Jackie Brown until 2019. I recognize that this is irrational self-sabotage. It is, in this case, especially irrational behavior given that my number-one all-time celebrity crush is mid-‘90s Robert De Niro.
Jane Campion's In the Cut dresses itself up as a neo-noir about a woman who “can contend only against the power of men.” But it’s a film that’s more than meets the eye, or the genre.
David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner is a neo-noir comedy of manners masquerading as a thriller, a confidence game as light and effortless as a masterful card trick.
In neo-noir roles, Mickey Rourke’s faces change, but his power as an actor never does.
It’s hard to absorb Black Widow if one is unprepared to see women as people. But once the audience understands that the relationship between these women powers the film—not their relationships with the men around them—its true quality becomes evident.
Fargo is an outlier in the world of neo-noir, protecting its heroes by ending their stories and defiantly leaving their purity intact as though to prove that happy endings are possible.
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence features mismatched animation styles, non sequitur montages, a sphinxlike plot presentation, and bulky meditations on the nature of reality. But such committed excessiveness, for this viewer, makes Innocence my favorite kind of film: powerful in its earnestness, and captivating in its thoughtful defiance.
How do we define a new masculinity that encourages men to engage emotionally with the world and with themselves? How do we teach men to ask for help, and how will society offer it?
I was wrong about so many things in 2014. I was wrong about Gone Girl. And, most significantly, I was wrong about my gender.
Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels is a tragi-comic noir about criminals who break their own hearts trying to find themselves and connect to others.
The Postmodern Mysteries of Wayne Wang’s Chan Is Missing
