Stitching the old film noir movie clips into a semi-coherent plot (no more muddled than THE BIG SLEEP) is a nifty trick. The comedy built around it is too often painfully dopey, a carryover of THE JERK'S rampant silliness and bawdiness but without the enlivening pulse of anarchy that drove the earlier film.
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Experiment Perilous 1944
Jacques Tourneur gives a film noir cast to this turn-of-the-century melodrama. Especially in the early scenes, as a train races through a pouring rainstorm, the visuals are rich and evocative. Although lead actor George Brent is stiff as a plank, the psychology built into the twisty screenplay is compelling.
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I'm Your Woman 2020
Director Julia Hart (who is also co-credited on the screenplay) brings smart, lean storytelling to the film, judiciously employing neo-noir trappings. She has a particular panache for understated conflict, lending the material an air of battered accuracy that recalls the grit-and-grime cinema of the nineteen-seventies era in which the film is set. Rachel Brosnahan is very good in the lead role, conveying that discomfort and dawning confidence of a person who was expecting that self-sufficiency wasn’t an attribute she’d be needing in her life.
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