B/W film noir is my favorite genre and I think I have seen all the great ones.
Neo-noir, well there is Body Heat, a favorite. Watching it now for about the 10th time. I’ve seen the one by Dennis Hopper, can’t remember the title now, and one with Madeline Stowe and Ed Harris, China Moon, pretty good.
Here are some lists of best neo-noir films I found online:
I suppose my personal favorites are these two:
Blood Simple. (1985, U.S., dir. Joel Coen)
Chinatown (1974, U.S., dir. Roman Polanski)
I don’t know about the best, but I liked Oldboy and Romeo is Bleeding.
Can’t believe none of those lists have Nicolas Cage’s 8mm. I’m also a huge fan of neo-noir and that movie is one of the best, in all seriousness, and totally underrated. Everyone just thinks “Nicolas Cage” and forgets that the film also includes James Gandolfini, Joaquin Phoenix, and Peter Stormare; has a phenomenal original score; and overall incredibly immersive world-building that sucks the viewer right into the atmosphere of grime and squalor. And it stays true to the original noir theme of a hardened protagonist uncovering a gruesome conspiracy that stretches all the way from the most depraved underbelly of society to the highest reaches of wealth and power.
“When you dance with the devil, the devil doesn’t change - the devil changes you.”
“LA Confidential“ is IMO the best neo-noir film around.
A more recent neo-noir that I really enjoyed was “Bad Times at the El Royale.”
My favorite is Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin. It’s got that 1967 LSD weirdness going on in it. While the cast looks straight, you get the impression that the screenwriter, the director, and the entire crew were sampling the electric orange juice throughout the filming.
My favorite is Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin. It’s got that 1967 LSD weirdness going on in it. While the cast looks straight, you get the impression that the screenwriter, the director, and the entire crew were sampling the electric orange juice throughout the filming.
To Live and Die in LA
How about the John Wick movies? They are action but there is a noir motif in them.
Brick, written and directed by the same guy who made Knives Out.
Try “Brick.” (2006) Great 1930-ish noir, a la “The Maltese Falcon” set in contemporary high school, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt investigating the death of an old girlfriend. Full of great dialogue, like “Throw one at me if you want, hash head. I’ve got all five senses and I slept last night, that puts me six up on the lot of you.”
Very well done!
Blade Runner, with a jaded ex-cop called in for one last job “retiring” replicants in a gloomy, rainy, decaying, future L.A.
Dark City, with an amnesiac man on the run for a murder he might (or might not) have committed in a strange, shadowy city that never seems to see the dawn.
Blue Velvet seems pretty Noirish to me.
L. A. Confidential is great, Chinatown is great, Memories of Murder kind of qualifies and is great.
Mullholland Falls would be noir except that it’s just too brightly lit and there was too much honest love between characters. No one was trying to cheat anyone else and the good guys were too good to be noir, despite their often shady actions. But the plot and atmosphere had that tension and there were dirty deeds afoot. And Nick Nolte’s speech to the Baldwin Brother he had just brutally beaten was epic-ally noir.
I like the movie, and Lee Marvin played the laconic but violent buy out for revenge perfectly. The “LSD weirdness” thing was funny, but that tune in the nightclub drove me batty with its never-ending simple repetitiveness. I wonder if it was actually played that way, or was just some riff continually looped for the movie.
dead again.
The nightclub scene was irritating, I agree. By “LSD weirdness” I was thinking more of the “bad trip” acid parts of the movie…the woman’s murder and the scene presented by her corpse, the fact that no one in the mob has access to the kind of money needed to pay off Walker because everything is handled by banks and computers by 1967, and the ghostly final scene…
Although it isn’t a movie but a netflix series, Babylon Berlin has a lot going for it in the noir department.
Some of my favs
Brick
The Grifters
Red Rock West
The Salton Sea