Devil In A Blue Dress Finds Exciting New Creative Directions to Take The Film Noir Genre

By the time the mid-1990's rolled around, American cinema had seen plenty of new takes on the classic film noir genre, whether they be serious neo-noirs like Blade Runner or more comedic takes on the same genre like Carl Reiner's Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. But in adapting a 1990 Walter Mosley novel of the same name, writer/director Carl Franklin's Devil in a Blue Dress managed to make a motion picture that certainly stood out among a massive pack of noir homages. This would be the rare neo-noir to feature a cast predominately comprised of people of color as well as centering on a story that touched on elements like interracial relationships that were previously forbidden from being discussed in film noirs made in the era when the Hayes Code reigned supreme.

The Zany Satire of Showgirls Is Equal Parts Entertaining And Impressively Thoughtful

Content Warning: Discussions of sex (it's a review of the most high-profile NC-17 movie of all-time, what did you expect?) and sexual assault ahead. 

What Ishtar was to the 1980's, Showgirls was to the 1990's, a unique high-profile movie that generated all kinds of scorn and became known as an all-time entry in the halls of bad cinema. But just like Ishtar, Showgirls has been given a hefty critical re-evaluation in recent years, with praise of the film being widespread enough for the project to warrant a theatrical screening at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City on Sunday, June 24, 2018 that I was lucky enough to attend. What better way to watch Paul Verhoeven's incredibly divisive motion picture for the first time than on a 35mm print projected on the big screen? Even if the film was terrible, the experience itself was too good to pass up!

Spend Seven (Or, Technically 127) Minutes In Thrilling Heaven With Davin Fincher's Excellent Thriller Seven

Though his most acclaimed movie may be the 2010 masterpiece The Social Network, which is very much a restrained down-to-Earth movie in many respects, David Fincher's 1995 thriller Seven reminds us all that this guy isn't just a cinematic auteur but also someone along the lines of Sam Raimi that loves to freak out his viewers with some truly sadistic imagery and sequences. You can see that in his most recent feature, Gone Girl, which has plenty of over-the-top kills and buckets of blood when the time comes for it. Fincher knows excellent shot composition and thoughtful narratives like the back of his hand but the guy also knows how to do grimy violence for shock value in a tantalizing manner that furthers the man's versatility as a filmmaker.