Word: noire
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...like a boring poker game that has its ending broadcast in the first hand. Rounders offers us convincing evidence that all the players involved should carefully adjust the directions of their careers. John Dahl, for instance, should return to the genre which made him famous--the sexually charged neo-noir thriller that he basically reinvented. Matt Damon should go for range and dive into a weird character--maybe even a villain. (Sacre bleu!) Gretchen Mol should have a heart-to-heart with Meryl Streep, and John Malkovich should just relax. In short, Rounders should be a transition piece...
...office bomb at the time of its release, Touch of Evil has nevertheless been heralded as one of the masterpieces of the noir genre. Charlton Heston plays Ramon Miguel "Mike" Vargas, a Mexican narcotics investigator embroiled in a shady murder investigation just on the other side of the border. Heading the investigation is Captain Hank Quinlan, played by a padded and bloated Welles. When Quinlan's abuse of power proves too great an affront to Vargas' moral sensibilities, he soon involves both himself and his newlywed American wife, played by a feisty Janet Leigh, in the cutthroat bordertown brawl between...
Part hardboiled thriller, part sensitive melodrama, with tears for the ladies and gunplay for the guys, the novel borrows a potent narrative trick from Kenneth Fearing's noir classic, The Big Clock: Schwartz tells the story from complementary viewpoints that must sooner or later collide and clash. In their grief and remorse, the three lead characters start out locked in separate universes. Ethan, insulated in his study, ceaselessly revisits happier days while simultaneously dreaming of revenge, despite a father who drilled him in nonviolence. Grace drifts in an existential darkness amid her bright perennials, her spirit crisping and withering leaf...
...director of Men in Black and Get Shorty and the cinematographer on three Coen brothers films, Barry Sonnenfeld has had lots of experience with a genre you could call bizarre noir. Now he has created his first TV show, and it has--in milder form--the surreality and edge of his earlier work. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, Maximum Bob stars Beau Bridges as a colorful, corrupt judge in a small Florida town. He's the kind of guy who will avoid paying his ex-wife alimony by putting her in jail. Amusing, smoothly put together and featuring...
...Film-noir fans quickly spotted the similarities between the Kimeses and the mother-and-son team of con artists in The Grifters, the 1990 movie starring Anjelica Huston and John Cusack. But any reader of dime-store detective novels knows that true grifters take their haul by trickery, not violence. When the police investigation is over, the Kimeses may be known by a less exotic word in the criminal lexicon: murderers...