Directed by Olivier Assayas • 2002 • France
Starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny
“No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don’t understand.” So observes Connie Nielsen in Olivier Assayas’s hallucinatory, globe-spanning DEMONLOVER, a postmodern neonoir thriller and media critique in which nothing—not even the film itself—is what it appears to be. Nielsen plays Diane de Monx, a Volf Corporation executive turned spy for rival Mangatronics in the companies’ battle over the lucrative market of internet adult animation. But Diane may not be the only player at Volf with a hidden agenda: both romantic interest Hervé (Charles Berling) and office enemy Elise (Chloë Sevigny) seem to know her secret and can easily use it against her for their own purposes. As the stakes grow higher and Diane ventures into deadlier territory, Assayas explores the connections between multinational businesses and extreme underground media as well as the many ways twenty-first-century reality increasingly resembles violent, disorienting fiction.
Up Next in Noir
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Lost Highway
Directed by David Lynch • 1997 • United States
Starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity, LOST HIGHWAY, David Lynch’s seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker’s most potent cinemati...
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The Postman Always Rings Twice
Directed by Tay Garnett • 1946 • United States
Starring Lana Turner, John Garfield, Cecil KellawayLana Turner and John Garfield set the screen ablaze with their smoldering chemistry in this erotically charged noir classic based on the novel by James M. Cain. Down-and-out drifter Frank Chambers ...
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Blood Simple
Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen • 1984 • United States
Starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan HedayaJoel and Ethan Coen's career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner releases...
