NY Mag - 33 Essential Neo-Noirs

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From Vulture/New York Magazine, a look at how noir films changed after 1959

"Neo-noir places the genre in new contexts and settings, and even cross-pollinates with other genres, as Blade Runner (1982) demonstrates. By the 1960s, noir had become self-referential and stylistically more blunt in a way that introduced new mores to the genre, often remixing the past as if in conversation with history. Free of the original studio system, neo-noir also has more brutal violence and sexually explicit scenes, turning what was once subtext into text. The noir of the aughts took this to an extreme, obsessing over the style of the genre’s past to the point where it can come across as empty pastiche á la Sin City (2005). In recent years, works like Top of the Lake, Destroyer, and others still care about style, but it’s grounded in the personal hells these characters navigate in their urban and rural landscapes.

The below list doesn’t include some of the more obvious, highly regarded neo-noirs, including Chinatown, Drive, and Zodiac, in order to provide a more varied overview of the genre. These films (and two TV shows) are a blend of cult classics, canonized favorites, and personal obsessions I feel are particularly illustrative of the soul of this period of noir, and how it has evolved in recent decades." - Angelica Jade Bastién