We review five highly outstanding titles within the neo-noirwhich helped mark a style that is becoming more and more consolidated.
‘Neo-noir’ is more than a genre, it is a visual style that inherited its most characteristic elements from film noir, so fashionable during the 1940s and 1950s. These stories full of current themes and more innovative narrative resources (such as flashbacks or non-linear structures) began to gain more acceptance and credibility from the 1980s onwards, but the new millennium witnessed the rebirth of these dark stories and their ambiguous characters. , with the help of new talents and other more established filmmakers who were already experimenting with this subgenre. Here, some of our favorite movies.
Drive: Action at Maximum Speed (Drive, 2011)
The ‘driver’ played by Ryan Gosling is the classic antihero of film noir: calm, lonely, thoughtful and willing to do whatever is necessary when the situation calls for it. Much to his regret, the anonymous protagonist of this stylized marvel directed by Nicolas Winding Refn – a specialist in stunts by day and a driver for criminals by night – will have no choice but to resort to extreme violence when a series of fortuitous events Events put him between a rock and a hard place, risky business dealings, and his increasingly growing affection for his neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and her young son.
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Brick (2005)
Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a lonely teenager who delves into the criminal underworld of a high school to try to find out the whereabouts of a missing ex-girlfriend. Rian Johnson’s debut as director and screenwriter was compared, at one point, to Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko (2001); and the way in which the classic detective narrative is crossed with the most modern teenage films, make it a very original bet on the genre, a great starting point for the director, who, years later, would give us some of the best episodes of Breaking Bad (2008-2013).
The Path of Dreams (Mulholland Dr., 2001)
Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) is a talented and naive aspiring actress who recently arrived in Hollywood who, after meeting Rita (Laura Harring) – a woman who claims to have lost her memory in a car accident – finds herself caught in the middle of a dark conspiracy. David Lynch drags us, along with the protagonists, into a maelstrom of surreal scenes (apparently, without any connection), strange places and mysterious and sinister characters, which make up a story whose meaning is completely open to our interpretation.
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Collateral: Wrong Place and Time (Collateral, 2004)
Michael Mann shines with his unmistakable and stylized aesthetic in this action thriller set in the streets of Los Angeles; city that is not only the setting of this story, but one more protagonist of the plot. A taxi driver (Jamoe Foxx) becomes the unlikely hero by being “in the wrong place at the wrong time,” when a hitman – Tom Cruise as Vincent, one of the best roles of his career – takes him hostage and kills him. forces him to visit different parts of the metropolis, as he carries out each of his violent ‘assignments’.
Zodiac (Zodiac, 2007)
David Fincher shows off his specialty and delivers with this thriller – based on a real case still unsolved – focused on a serial killer (“the Zodiac Killer”) who left a trail of victims, and the police in a very bad position. , during the 1970s in the San Francisco area.
The film chronicles the joint efforts of a group of investigators and reporters (a great cast made up of Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr. and Anthony Edwards, among others) who become obsessed with catching this elusive criminal.
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