Noir
Noah’s Barks pages relating to the film noir genre, as well as things inspired by it.
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The Big O
‘The Big O’ is an excellent post-modern, neo-noir tone piece and surreal mystery that will test the limits of how much you believe a story is about the journey and not the destination. (read more)
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Wicked City
Neo-noir meets neo-gore as Yoshiaki Kawajiri takes audiences to Wicked City, an atmospheric, criminal underground where demons stalk the streets for their next meal. Spend a night lost in its streets. (read more)
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Touch of Evil
Touch of Evil is a gigantic, ruthless bore for the first half, making no effort to have an engaging hook: a murder mystery about a case where the victims or the crime itself don’t actually matter. The main story about a detective jurisdiction dispute lacks fire when Orson Welles’s jabs are minor and ignored by… (read more)
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12 Monkeys
Sci-fi stories about the futility of attempting to change the past are nothing fresh, but 12 Monkeys dresses its thought experiment up in a moebius strip story and a tech-noir thriller atmosphere. In spite of this, the diffident screenwriters view their own ideas as lunacy and introduce tasteless comedy while taking the easy ways out… (read more)
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Le Samouraï
With Le Samouraï, Jean-Pierre Melville crafts a minimalist noir where absolute silence is golden, a foil to the heavy use of grey tones that cast dark, foreboding clouds over the slow proceedings. Possibly the most beautiful film of the ’60s, every scene takes place in real-time as if a natural coil is slowly wrapping around… (read more)
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The Maltese Falcon
The Maltese Falcon succeeds as well as any mystery could by making nearly every single character a suspect. Anything could happen at any time, and everyone is involved in one large plot roped around one titular bird. Second-guessing every character’s personality and trying to read inbetween their lines becomes a sport that demands constant attention,… (read more)
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Blade Runner
As much as I like Blade Runner—and I do, because I can overlook many things for a movie with great style and visual design (and boy, does Blade Runner have those in spades)—it definitely has its issues. Blade Runner‘s themes and relationships are too ambitious for its two-hour runtime, and I was already well-acquainted with… (read more)
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Mulholland Drive
Mulholland Drive works because David Lynch finally bends his surrealism around a storyline instead of shoving the storyline into the surrealism. Because Mulholland Drive is fairly straightforward, it provides the audience a tangible mystery and characters to motivate the deciphering of its plot. Amidst the chilling confusion are several memorable scenes that keep attention throughout… (read more)