Filmmaker Jake Goldberger’s fine debut has traces of both James M. Cain and the early Coen brothers in its curious, noir-tinted style.
Mislabeled as a thriller, this allusive film is more “ha-ha” than hardboiled. Thomas Haden Church plays a lonely, dulled-by-routine custodian who rushes home when a note arrives: his one-time love is dying. After 25 years away, he’s more compliant than Pavlov’s hound upon reuniting with the loony, blonde beaut (Elisabeth Shue). But, as in many a noir, nothing can be taken at face value, with the dark and knowing narrative leading to a surprising end.
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Based on David Peace’s cult novels about the far-reaching tentacles of the corrupt West Yorkshire police force in the ’70s and ’80s, Red Riding hits theaters as an anomic, must-see trilogy.
“Dickens on bad acid” is the phrase used by screenwriter Tony Grisoni (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) to pithily describe the sprawling, paranoiac nature of the telefilms he wrote for Channel 4 in the UK. This inky triptych nears Bacon-esque nightmarishness and ravishment, with each part helmed by a different talent shooting in a different format. Together, Julian Jarrold (gritty 16mm), James Marsh (elegant 35mm), and Anand Tucker (immersive widescreen) magnificently exhume a past in which the cutthroat police have a members-only toast: “To the North, where we do what we want.”
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British photographer Julian Hibbard pairs his signature dark images with the twenty-six letters of the alphabet in his racy new abecedary The Noir A-Z. The collection is a shadowy, voyeuristic look at the noir side of life, tapping into childhood memories, cinematic recollections and strong cultural references like fairytales. We’ve got an exclusive look at the new volume, underscored by commentary from Hibbard himself on selection of images representing U, C, G, K, E, S, and Q. Play along with us after the cut.
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Criterion’s latest Eclipse box set offers five deliriously stylized potboilers from postwar Japan.
The isle’s oldest studio, Nikkatsu, countered popular Western imports during the ’50s and ’60s by exploiting the competition’s pulpy traits with its mukokeseki akushun (“borderless action”) films. Fusing hardboiled, Franco-American noir to modes as disparate as the rebel thriller and the Western, this action-oriented set includes titles by icons Seijun Suzuki and Takashi Nomura.
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Hannah Berry’s debut graphic novel, Britten and Brülightly, is a gorgeously rendered murder mystery that comes up somewhere between The Triplets of Belleville and The Big Sleep. A graduate of Brighton University’s illustration program, Berry is all too eager to fill the twin roles of author and artist, giving her satisfyingly complex story an enthusiastic momentum. Our sister publication Boldtype caught up with Berry to talk about artistic masochism, the balance between writing and visualizing, and her love of the Coen Brothers.
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