Directed by George Armitage • 1990 • United States
Starring Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Fred Ward
Based on the novel by crack crime writer Charles Willeford and produced by Jonathan Demme, this marvelously offbeat, black-comic caper features a totally unhinged performance from Alec Baldwin as sociopathic ex-con Frederick J. Frenger Jr., a.k.a. Junior, who, immediately upon being released from prison, books it to Miami, inadvertently kills a man in the airport, and hooks up with Susie Waggoner (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a sweetly naive sex worker who longs for domestic stability. When he gets ahold of a badge and gun (plus a set of false teeth) belonging to Detective Hoke Moseley (Fred Ward), Junior embarks on a wild crime spree posing as a police officer—with the grizzled Moseley in dogged pursuit.
Up Next in Noir
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Demonlover
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 med...
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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...
