Word: noire
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...killing? (Fast food in Amsterdam.) How do you escape a fate worse than death? (With luck and honor.) How do you date your gang boss's wife? (Very carefully.) How do you remove those telltale blood stains from the backseat? (Very quickly.) Spinning delirious variations on familiar film noir conventions and pulling career-best performances from < Travolta, Willis, Thurman and especially Jackson as a Bible-spouting sociopath, Tarantino makes a smart, fatal movie. It's Die Hard with a brain...
Cinema: Red Rock West, a film noir worthy of the term...
...been impatiently awaiting. And if Michael had been a little less desperate he might not have pocketed the cash. But then, if people were in general a little less stupid and and a lot less greedy, there would have been no need to invent film noir in the first place...
...Rock West belongs to that genre's low-budget country-and-western subspecies. Michael is a classic film noir protagonist, essentially a good, slightly dim sort who is drawn into evil's web because of a momentary weakness and whose struggles to escape serve only to entangle him more tightly. In film noir, the spider at the center of such a web is usually a woman, and in this case she is Suzanne (Lara Flynn Boyle), Michael's intended victim. After he spares her, she expresses her gratitude by luring him still nearer to destruction. Film noir also typically calls...
...film noir, evil is endemic in our history and our society, inescapably embracing both sexes and every social type. Putting it mildly, the genre is -- or was -- cynical and subversive. But given the power of humanistic piety in contemporary movies -- it is virtually the only acceptable tone for American films seeking an adult audience -- film noir, if it's done at all, is usually accompanied by nostalgic winks and genial, reassuring cues of self- consciousness. Just kidding, folks, say the filmmakers. Red Rock West, in contrast, is all furious conviction. Its humor is sardonic; its ironies are conveyed by violence...