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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In a Lonely Place
Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1950 • United States
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Gloria GrahameWhen a gifted but washed-up screenwriter with a hair-trigger temper—Humphrey Bogart, in a revelatory, vulnerable performance—becomes the prime suspect in a brutal Tinseltown murder, the only person who ca...
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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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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...
