For Noirvember this year I decided to do something a little different. Rather than burrow into classic and obscure noir films from the past, I wanted to watch, re-watch, and review some of 2024s crime film output. Film noir and neo-noir are slippery enough genres to get one's hands around and "hardboiled" crime might be trickier yet, but I think the following films contain sufficient explicit crime content to distinguish them from broader categories.
10. American Star - American Star is a character driven, atmospheric approach to the contemplative aging assassin canon. Gonzalo López-Gallego's reserved filmmaking places significant weight on Ian McShane's force of personality as well as beautifully desolate footage of Fuerteventrua, but I found myself willing to take the ride. McShane's Wilson is forced to wait for an anticipated target and spends his time exploring the island and interacting with both fellow travelers and the locals. Events take a turn when a fellow assassin from his past lands on the island to ensure the job is done correctly. The titular American Star refers to an actual ocean liner that wrecked off of Fuerteventura's coast and presents an object of fascination for Wilson. American Star is not a genre thrill ride but is enjoyable on its own terms if you understand what you're getting into. I found it thoughtful and lyrical and there are some wonderfully delicate scenes. The film ultimately cannot escape violence anymore than Wilson can so blood is definitely shed before the credits roll.
Arguably more martial arts throwdown than capital "C" crime film, Soi Cheang's
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In is still enough of a triad brotherhood drama to land it a spot on this list. Raymond Lam plays a mainland refugee with formidable fighting prowess who manages to find sanctuary and a surrogate family in the Kowloon Walled City. Living legend, Sammo Hung, plays an avaricious crime boss who wants to carve out his own territory in the City so he can profit on its eventual redevelopment. I sometimes struggle with 21st Century HK cinema - it's too glossy for my preferences and often leans into CGI in unfortunately ways. The Kowloon Walled City setting adds some much needed lived in texture in
Twilight to contrast the larger than life action sequences. The city (naturally) needed to be recreated for the film and its labyrinthine, multistory immensity provides a interesting backdrop for the innovative, hard hitting fight sequences.
Twilight does escape the gravity of reality for more of a comic/manga sensibility at times, but it's having so much fun doing so it's impossible not to get swept up in it.
8. Borderless Fog - Modern Indonesian action and horror seem to be having a moment, but Edwin's
Borderless Fog largely dispenses with genre excesses to deliver a straightlaced, steely police procedural. Putri Marino plays a Jakarta detective who is travels to investigate a series of macabre killings along the Indonesian-Malaysian border. There is a unique socio-political context operating in
Borderless Fog and I don't pretend to understand all of the nuances. Significant tension surrounds the Dayak people in the film and their autonomy in the face of Indonesian authority as well as the oversight of jurisdiction between Indonesia and Malaysia. Even if I don't have the context to interpret all of this - I do love a border noir and I found these details added some interesting wrinkles to the proceedings. While there is nothing overtly supernatural in
Borderless Fog - it is still very dark, mysterious, and even strange at times. I found myself hooked into it immediately and it also features multiple severed heads for anyone questioning its hardboiled bona fides.
7. LaRoy, Texas - Shane Atkinson makes his feature debut with a Texas noir trip down to Coen Bros. territory.
LaRoy is a ranging detective story starring John Magaro as a depressed hardware store manager (Ray) who is mistaken for a traveling hitman (Dylan Baker) and slips into a knotty conspiracy of infidelity, blackmail, murder, and betrayal. Steve Zahn plays a wannabe detective sporting a bolo tie and an oversized cowboy hat who bullies Ray into investigating the mystery only to sink further into trouble. None of this is strikingly original territory but it's rendered exceedingly well. Buoyed by a terrific ensemble - Zahn is as good here as I've ever seen him - and amidst the absurdity there's a lonesome darkness at the heart of this tale.
LaRoy offers a distinctly evocative noir look - bleak earth tone days give way to expressive red and blue nights - and I believe this is cinematogrpaher Ming Jue Hu's feature debut as well.
6. The Shadow Strays - The all-violence MVP of this list. Timo Tjahjanto's epic assassin vengeance tale blends some Besson-ian plot threads into a exhaustingly brutal series of fight scenes and action set-pieces. Aurora Ribero stars as 13, a young member of an elite squad of trained killers (they're basically ninjas) known as the Shadows. After fumbling during a mission to Japan, 13 is sent back home to lay low where she becomes nearly instantaneously embroiled in a criminal conspiracy involving the kid living next door.
The Shadow Strays employs only the barest skeleton of a plot or character motivations but makes up for that with a non-stop supply of gory, pulpy gangster insanity. Ribero's 13 is convincingly capable and resolute but the real fun is in the rogues' gallery of antagonists: A giggling psychopathic cop, a shotgun wielding madam, an inhuman hulk of an assassin, and spoiled rich kid sporting a gimp mask and a white Tony Montana suit. There are plenty of vfx "enhanced" sequences in
Strays but the bedrock of the film is made of bone crunching fighting and stunt work. Some people definitely got set on fire to make this movie happen. At nearly two and a half hours, burnout is an understandable reaction to the marathon of onscreen mayhem and there's a postscript that I'm not sure how I feel about. Still, the action goes to such extremes that I was shaking my head in disbelief until the very end.
5. The Last Stop in Yuma County - Francis Galluppi's remarkably assured feature debut certainly shows influence from filmmakers in a similar milieu but also features a wonderfully charismatic ensemble, dark humor that actually lands, and a genuine facility for building suspense until it boils over in a thrillingly brutal climax. The early phase of the film consists of travelers stranded in a nowheresville service station/diner with a pair of fugitive bank robbers due to the lack of gas. Not everyone is aware of the criminals' true identity and this uncertainty propels much of the drama until things inevitably detonate in a satisfyingly gnarly standoff. From there ill-considered plans turn apocalyptically awful resulting in a soberingly grim conclusion.
Yuma County's cast is solid all the way through featuring Jim Cummings as a anxiety ridden salesman wondering how he found himself in such a mess and Richard Brake positively exuding menace as one of the bank robbers.
Yuma County is the kind of smaller, smart, stylish genre exercise I find easy to root for and I hope Galluppi turns his talents towards more crime features down the line.
4. The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon - Wong Ching-Po's
The Pig, the Snake and the Pigeon starts as a plausible, if high octane, action/crime thriller - gangsters, cops, foot chases through narrow corridors, bone shattering close range fisticuffs - and then takes a breath before becoming a much weirder movie. The plot is very loosely based on Zhou Chu and the Three Scourges: Ethan Juan is a notorious gangster (Chen Kui-lin) with a terminal diagnosis hanging over his head who decides to take on the other two most wanted men in Taiwan before he turns himself in or dies in the effort. The first leg of his journey is a nighttime vigilante mission where he meets a young woman essentially enslaved by his first target. The second part eschews neon lights and city streets for blinding daylight and pastoral scenes involving a spiritual organization/cult. Further mysteries are revealed before
Pigeon erupts in one of the bloodiest, most nihilistic climaxes I've seen all year. It's a moment that truly harkens back to the East Asian cinematic insanity of the late 20th Century. Great, magnetic performances - not only from Juan but from the gangsters as well.
Pigeon is unrelentingly violent, some of it coursing with adrenaline and other moments are startlingly abrupt. The plot certainly isn't predictable and even if the denouement goes on a little long - it hits like a ton of bricks by the end.
3. Love Lies Bleeding - Rose Glass' neon and synth drenched neo-noir revenge saga set around a New Mexico bodybuilding gym looks and sounds tremendous. It's swimming in blood, drugs, food, sweat, muscles, and guns. Irrepressibly carnal at times but also pervasively gross - including touches of body horror. Katy O'Brien's athletic stature clearly fits the needs of the story and she delivers an excellent performance as well - especially during some of the quieter moments before things get increasingly heightened. Kristen Stewart continues to be a supremely compelling screen presence and her instincts and line deliveries are impeccable here. I'd also say Ed Harris is brilliantly weird and sinister every time he's on screen. I'm 98-99% totally infatuated with
Love Lies Bleeding. I think the first hour of scenario and character building is unimpeachable and I'm still on board as
Bleeding follows Jackie (O'Brien) down a steroid and violence fueled trajectory of instability becoming increasingly surreal. However, I struggle with the level of magical realism employed in the finale. The stakes are ratcheted up ferociously and I crave something less fanciful in the resolution. Still, everything leading up to that is masterful and I rate
Love Lies Bleeding highly for the year.
2. Outlaw - Electric, visually chaotic, and bursting with streetwise authenticity, João Wainer's
Outlaw may, in fact, be the most hardboiled film I've seen this year. Based on Raquel de Oliveira's 2015 memoir, Outlaw features Maria Bomani as Rebeca, a street kid in the Rocinha favela who grows up to be one of the most feared drug lords in Rio de Janeiro. The subject matter unyieldingly brutal - Rebeca is sold to a drug dealer and pedophile by her gambling addict grandmother after being abandoned by her mother. She narrowly avoids the sex trade but is no less indoctrinated into the world of gangs, drug trafficking, and violence. Wainer renders the ensuing tale of crime, money, love, power, and betrayal with an anarchic, maximalist approach to filmmaking.
Outlaw careens through aspect ratios, color, black & white, high def, low res video, archival footage, and even back and forth through time like a hail of bullets through the favela. It's an explosive, disorienting approach but it suits the onscreen bedlam perfectly. Maria Bomani is an absolute revelation in the role of Rebeca - tough as nails, smart, sexy, and capable in the midst of a firefight as well as the thoughtful narrator of the film.
Outlaw is reminiscent of 90s L.A. street gang stories as far as its driving narrative arc, but it's a much grimier style and the focus on a female protagonist still feels singular today.
1. The Order - Based on the real events involving the titular group of radical white supremacists, Justin Kruzel's The Order is a magnificently taut heist thriller/police procedural in the vein of Michael Mann or Peter Yates. Jude Law plays FBI agent Terry Husk who instead of finding a quiet post away from high profile cases starts pulling threads connected to an increasingly dangerous group of domestic terrorists. Nicholas Hoult plays the young leader of the burgeoning militia and manages to be chillingly threatening without becoming a caricature. The crime content of the film is outrageously good. Bombings, heists, and shootouts are executed with white knuckle tension set to the metronomic score from Jed Kurzel. This is a period piece and it does feel like a bit of a nod to crime films of the 70s and early 80s - The Order is played perfectly straight and shows a professional fascination with how both criminals and law enforcement operate. My initial reaction was that the white separatists were shown as too competent - but reading into the backstory, they were actually frighteningly organized and effective. Jude Law is admirably grizzled as Husk and the supporting cast (especially Tye Sheridan and Jurnee Smollett) lend sturdy performances as well. Overall just the kind of intelligent, impactful genre filmmaking I love to see.
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