Latest news with #noir
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gazer review – ineffably creepy and unbearably tense noir chiller
Here is a paranoid noir chiller from the US, shot on 16mm on the mean streets of Jersey City; it is a fascinating debut for first-time feature director Ryan J Sloan that premiered at Cannes last year and is now getting its much-deserved UK release. A genuine skin-crawling unease seeps out of the screen for every second of its running time, helped by a brooding, moaning electronic score by Steve Matthew Carter. This ineffably creepy, often unbearably tense and disquieting film has a little of early Christopher Nolan (the Nolan of Following and Memento), with hints of Lynch and Cronenberg in its hallucinatory episodes. Sloan's co-writer and partner Ariella Mastroianni (reportedly a very distant relative of Marcello) stars as Frankie, a woman living on the edge of poverty, suffering from the neurogenerative disorders ataxia and dyschronometria. This means that she is disoriented and cannot accurately judge the passing of time, a condition she attempts to manage by listening to 30-minute tapes on an old-fashioned Sony Walkman, and by gazing in at the windows of total strangers. Her pinched, sharp, intelligent and discontented face dominates the screen; she radiates suppressed anguish and rage at everything that has happened and will happen to her, and at the idea that her condition means she will have to resign herself to an assisted living facility. The scene in which a harassed doctor puts this to her is itself a masterly set piece of grimness. Her husband apparently took his own life some time ago, an ambiguous event which recurs to her in vivid nightmares – was she somehow responsible? – which means Frankie is now legally obliged to let her young daughter be looked after by her glowering mother-in-law. At a therapy group for those who have lost loved ones to suicide, Frankie meets a mysteriously intense young woman (Renee Gagner) whom she remembers seeing in a window, and who puts to her a strange proposition; she says she is being abused and bullied by her aggressive cop brother (Jack Alberts) and needs to get away from their shared apartment, but he is keeping her car keys. If Frankie will break into the apartment and get them, and drive her car to the remote Jersey wetlands, she can have $3,000. But can Frankie do this without zoning out, or suffering one of her 'flashforward' episodes where hours can suddenly go past in an instant? Gazer's atmosphere of looming disaster and dreamlike oppression crowds in on you as the movie progresses; an intriguing, genuinely scary picture. Gazer is in UK cinemas from 25 July.
The Guardian
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Gazer review – ineffably creepy and unbearably tense noir chiller
Here is a paranoid noir chiller from the US, shot on 16mm on the mean streets of Jersey City; it is a fascinating debut for first-time feature director Ryan J Sloan that premiered at Cannes last year and is now getting its much-deserved UK release. A genuine skin-crawling unease seeps out of the screen for every second of its running time, helped by a brooding, moaning electronic score by Steve Matthew Carter. This ineffably creepy, often unbearably tense and disquieting film has a little of early Christopher Nolan (the Nolan of Following and Memento), with hints of Lynch and Cronenberg in its hallucinatory episodes. Sloan's co-writer and partner Ariella Mastroianni (reportedly a very distant relative of Marcello) stars as Frankie, a woman living on the edge of poverty, suffering from the neurogenerative disorders ataxia and dyschronometria. This means that she is disoriented and cannot accurately judge the passing of time, a condition she attempts to manage by listening to 30-minute tapes on an old-fashioned Sony Walkman, and by gazing in at the windows of total strangers. Her pinched, sharp, intelligent and discontented face dominates the screen; she radiates suppressed anguish and rage at everything that has happened and will happen to her, and at the idea that her condition means she will have to resign herself to an assisted living facility. The scene in which a harassed doctor puts this to her is itself a masterly set piece of grimness. Her husband apparently took his own life some time ago, an ambiguous event which recurs to her in vivid nightmares – was she somehow responsible? – which means Frankie is now legally obliged to let her young daughter be looked after by her glowering mother-in-law. At a therapy group for those who have lost loved ones to suicide, Frankie meets a mysteriously intense young woman (Renee Gagner) whom she remembers seeing in a window, and who puts to her a strange proposition; she says she is being abused and bullied by her aggressive cop brother (Jack Alberts) and needs to get away from their shared apartment, but he is keeping her car keys. If Frankie will break into the apartment and get them, and drive her car to the remote Jersey wetlands, she can have $3,000. But can Frankie do this without zoning out, or suffering one of her 'flashforward' episodes where hours can suddenly go past in an instant? Gazer's atmosphere of looming disaster and dreamlike oppression crowds in on you as the movie progresses; an intriguing, genuinely scary picture. Gazer is in UK cinemas from 25 July.
Yahoo
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The most surreal noir thriller of the year just landed on Hulu — and it will stick with you for days
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. If you're a fan of Hollywood, you probably watched "The Studio," Apple's critically acclaimed comedy about the movie-making business. But if you're a fan of the noir genre, you were probably disappointed by the show's least successful episode. Smack dab in the middle of "The Studio," the series shifts gears and becomes a shadowy thriller in which Seth Rogen's bumbling studio head attempts to track down a stolen film reel. The episode was a tonal misfire, a rare blip in an otherwise near-perfect season of television and a bummer to anyone whose favorite movie is "Double Indemnity," "Chinatown" or any other noir classic. But to paraphrase a famous Bible verse, when Hollywood takes away, it also gives. And in this case, that gift comes in the form of "The Actor," an indie noir about the dark side of show business that just made its streaming debut on Hulu. "The Actor" is everything that "The Studio's" noir detour failed to be: a taut, trippy, and fiercely authentic thriller that blurs the lines of cinema and reality until they're completely unrecognizable. What is 'The Actor' about? "The Actor" is the kind of movie that's best watched knowing as little as possible, but if you insist, I'll give you a brief overview. Paul Cole (André Holland) is an actor traveling with a theater troupe who decides to sleep with a married woman while on the road. After the husband gives him a brutal beating, Paul winds up with amnesia and gets stranded somewhere in the Midwest. Without enough money to get back home to New York , he takes a $5 bus to a mysterious town and finds a job at the local factory. He also meets a beguiling woman (Gemma Chan) and begins to fall in love. In the movie's meaty second act, an old playbill triggers Paul's memory just enough to dislodge his New York address. He heads home, but soon learns some disturbing truths about the man he once was. After struggling to revive his acting career — his utter failure to deliver a single line for a minor role on live television leads to the movie's most stressful moment — Paul attempts to make his way back to a town and a woman he can barely remember. Noir meets showbiz "The Actor" isn't so much a movie about the business of acting as it is a warning about the perils of the profession. Even without the amnesia, Paul lives a sad and depressing life. When he arrives in New York, he learns he was juggling several girlfriends, all of whom seem to hate him. His old friends aren't much better, goading Paul into telling offensive jokes and snickering at him behind his back. It's only when Paul abandons that career for a job in a factory that he seems to find some measure of happiness. But while "The Actor" is surprisingly short on scenes about acting, its promise of noir storytelling comes through in every frame. Filmed on a soundstage in Budapest, where director Duke Johnson could control each tiny variable, the movie is bathed in moody shadows and shades of grey. The music, dialogue, and direction come together to perfectly recreate the feeling of a femme fatale mystery. There's no hesitation or winking at the audience, just pure commitment to this high-concept cinematic vision. The acting in 'The Actor' At the center of the film is André Holland, who appears in nearly every scene and beautifully conveys the experience of a man drifting through life with no memories of his past. Paul is somehow both perpetually lost and unnaturally confident, as if amnesia robbed him not just of his life story but of his anxiety, too. It's hard to imagine anyone else in the role (although, fun fact: Ryan Gosling was originally set to star before dropping out for scheduling reasons). Holland's performance alone is enough to anchor "The Actor," but the rest of the cast isn't slacking either. It's clear everyone involved is fully devoted to both the noir aesthetic that envelopes the film like cigarette smoke, and the Hollywood critique at its core. Each scene and each line feels pulled straight out of some lost 1940s thriller. It just goes to show what's possible when you decide on a bit and stick to it. Stream "The Actor" on Hulu More on Tom's Guide 5 classic summer blockbusters just landed on streaming — and they'll make you feel like a kid again 5 best underwater thrillers to watch right now 35 summer movies we can't wait to see in theaters, Netflix and more
Irish Times
15-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Crime fiction: Megan Abbott, Elmore Leonard, Luke Beirne, Paul Vidich, Karin Slaughter and K Anis Ahmed
Megan Abbott's El Dorado Drive (Virago, £22) is a dark, satisfying delight. Abbott's writing has always been hypnotic, projecting a powerful sense of women's inner lives and desires through the prisms of noir and suspense. El Dorado Drive – her first novel explicitly set in her hometown, the archetypal old-money Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, where 'Eisenhower was still president' – anchors that strength in a newly intimate sense of place. Abbott also has some new razor-edged fun here with American suburbia's satire-ready pathologies as they break through the patina of country club life. The three Bishop sisters take centre stage: Pam's ex has stolen their kids' college funds; Debra's helping her husband through chemo; and Harper's coping with a break-up. Born into comfort, these three 'never thought about money until it was gone and then it was all any of them thought about'. Heavily indebted and newly evicted, Harper's crashing with Pam, who tells her about the Wheel. Ostensibly a women's support group, each meeting of the Wheel concludes with a woman receiving a pile of cash from the newest members. Although one character unconvincingly insists the Wheel's 'not a pyramid … It's a triangle,' Harper recognises it means 'selling the women you knew. Even the ones you loved,' by capitalising on their economic vulnerability. Struggling with her own secrets and debts, Harper sets aside her unease to join the group. READ MORE As the scheme plays out, a narcotic mix of regret, fear and love drives Abbott's characters forward, until someone winds up dead. The local cops, used to 'toilet paper vandalism and DUIs', are quickly out of their depth, leaving Harper to push for answers. As Harper tries to piece it all together, Abbott subtly moves her characters through slyly crafted surprises to a satisfying conclusion that betrays none of this book's intoxicating depth. Another great Detroit-area writer, Elmore Leonard – one of America's most distinctive crime novelists – gets some well-designed reissues from the Penguin Modern Classics: Crime and Espionage list. Like Abbott, Leonard has a gift for giving characters their own voices, his spare prose doing so as concisely as possible, even when – as in the lead reissue, Rum Punch (Penguin, £9.99) – describing extravagantly dramatic things like Nazi killing, gun running and money smuggling. Elmore Leonard in Detroit, Michigan, in 1992. Photograph: Michael Brennan/Getty Three of Rum Punch's main characters return from another welcome reissue, The Switch, where the kidnapping of a Detroit developer's wife very much fails to go as planned. Ordell, Louis and Melanie haven't grown noticeably luckier, smarter or kinder since then, but Rum Punch gets a different spark from airline steward Jackie, who's entangled in their schemes. Both more complex and easier to root for, Jackie is drawn as vividly as anything in Leonard's best work, and she makes Rum Punch sing. Irish-Canadian journalist Luke Beirne's third novel, the quietly moving Saints Rest (Baraka Books, CAD$24.95), is set around St John, Newfoundland, an atmospherically drawn landscape that's key to the story. Narrator Frank Cain is the junior member of a small PI agency, weighed down by a job that too often involves 'helping the rich stay rich and the poor stay hungry'. Warily, he takes on a new client, Malory Fleet, whose son Jason, a low-level dealer, was murdered exactly a year ago. Now, Jason's girlfriend Amanda has disappeared, and Malory, who sees her as a daughter, wants her back. Immersing himself in the case, Frank soon loses his moorings, uncertain even whether Amanda fled or was taken. As he tries to find Amanda without losing himself along the way, Saints Rest unfolds quickly to a short, sharp shock of a conclusion. Paul Vidich's The Poet's Game (No Exit, £18.99), an espionage thriller set in 2018 Washington and Moscow, is a worthy follow-up to his memorable Beirut Station. Vidich details political gamesmanship with an exactitude in the tradition of John le Carré, whose influence he ably honours. A former CIA operative, Alex Matthews now runs Trinity Capital, a financial firm in Moscow, a city he knows well from his days as the CIA station chief. When the CIA director asks Alex back to help extricate an asset he recruited – code name Byron, the last remaining agent of his old network – Alex agrees. His sense of duty lingers, though his commitment to the CIA had long been diminishing 'like a slow dusk' because of the agency's growing hypocrisy, leading to his marginalisation and early retirement. As Alex soon discovers, that institutional hypocrisy has endured: it looms large here, resting uneasily alongside his own love, guilt, and grief. A tragic personal backstory reverberates throughout the novel, adding depth to Alex's character without overwhelming the central plot. The action moves ahead at an elegant pace and concludes on a pitch-perfect note. Hugely popular bestseller Karin Slaughter starts a new series with We Are All Guilty Here (HarperCollins, £22). Although some of the seams show – this is a long book, full of plot twists and more than enough characters to populate several titles – Slaughter's clearly a real pro who's very, very skilled at what she does. The propulsive first third captures the pressure between being a teen in a small town and the often naive helplessness of the adults struggling to love them. Desperate to be adults, Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker find themselves dangerously out of their depth. When they disappear, the community rushes to find them. While trying to ensure that fear doesn't make neighbours 'tear each other apart', Deputy Emmy Clifton-Lang and her father Sheriff Gerald Clifton quickly find damning physical evidence, but their interrogations provide the leads that matter most. Twelve years later, another girl disappears in disturbingly similar circumstances. This case throws its shadows over Emmy's own family, leaving bruises that will surely linger through the series. Embedded in its small Georgia town, We Are All Guilty Here stands out for often being as invested in these families as in the crimes they encounter. Spinning a tale of hubris, Bangladesh memories, and exotic meats, K Anis Ahmed's Carnivore (HarperCollins, £16.99) is an energetic romp through a moneyed world that stops at nothing to feed its ego. Bangladeshi emigrant Kash Mirza opened an exclusive Manhattan restaurant in the summer of 2008, when 'alpha-nerds with PhDs in stochastic mathematics or God-knows-what had no clue … markets would tank …everyone would be a millionaire.' Kash rode this wave as blindly as the rest, never anticipating the imminent crash. By the fall, though, those financial sharks 'turned into broken relics' and Kash faces being broken too, by Boris, a gangster from whom he borrowed a bit too much a bit too often. Trying to figure out how he landed in such a precarious situation, Kash summons the ghosts of his childhood and of his fellow ex-pats. As Boris presses for repayment, cutting off Kash's pinky along the way, Carnivore follows Kash's increasingly inspired efforts to survive. He soon double-talks his way to a meeting with an international group of billionaire gastronomes, selling them an 'Evening of Danger' to appease their ennui. As the novel moves to its culinary climax and Kash's rationalisations accumulate, Ahmed surrounds him with a vivid secondary cast, making this a charmingly gruesome depiction of his race for survival.
CNET
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CNET
I Saw This Cartoon Gumshoe Shooter in Action. It's a Video Game Miracle
Mouse: P.I. for Hire is the kind of fun video game miracle of making wild ideas into reality. What started as a throwaway "what if" post on social media about a first-person shooter styled like a classic Betty Boop-era cartoon has turned into a full video game I saw being played in front of me at Summer Game Fest -- and the gumshoe gunplay game is due out later this year. In Australian publisher PlaySide's private booth tucked into a corner of the Summer Game Fest grounds in Los Angeles, I sat down with the game's lead producer Maciej Krzemień and game director Mateusz Michalak of the Poland-based Fumi Games while the former played through a level that will be in the final game. The first-person shooter combat, detective gameplay and story were a delight to behold in the game's signature black-and-white cartoon style -- along with the icing on the cake, hearing famed gaming voice actor Troy Baker speak as protagonist Jack Pepper. It also gave me an idea for the flow of the game, which follows the titular private eye Pepper in his investigation, and is split between replayable levels (more on that later). Dripping with noir staples of cops, crime, loyalties and betrayal, the writing and story set the stage just as much as the period music and film grain visual filter. For a Polish studio, the game leans into the distinctly American side of noir; Raymond Chandler's works were prime inspirations for the game's story and vibe, and the team's narrative leads consulting historical research to make sure the language fit with gamer expectations. "Obviously, we are not Americans ourselves. We wanted to get a good grasp on this entire style of detective noir stories, but with some light-hearted elements to it," Krzemień said. Fumi Games My preview was an early part of the game and opened up at an opera house, where Pepper was trying to track down his old friend, a magician tied to the case he's investigating. Barred from entry to the opera, Pepper has to sneak in through the kitchen, giving players the option to pay off a line cook or sneak in through the vents. But we got a moment to peek through the window to engage with a detective mechanic: using a camera to gather clues, which gives you insight into the case and the big players who may have a hand in what seems like a growing plot -- one that Pepper will chart on a conspiracy board at the hub players visit between missions. You can hunt through levels, taking photos that will even open up sidequests, or just keep running and gunning. Fumi Games "Without spoiling anything, there is a bigger conspiracy behind it all, and it's all pretty serious in terms of social topics, social themes of the game, and it actually reflects the political climate of the world back in the 1930s -- and not only in America," Krzemień said. I asked if that meant the rise of fascism. "Exactly," Krzemień said. To deliver on their blend of heavy conspiracy story and levity in cartoon logic, Fumi Games started shopping around for a voice actor who could deliver both, drawing up a list of well-known names to do the job of Pepper's jaded P.I. -- and they singled out Troy Baker for his wide range (an astonishingly expansive list including Joel in The Last of Us, Talion in Shadow of Mordor and Indy himself in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny). "It felt so out there that we didn't believe that this would be possible," Krzemień said -- but the game's publisher, PlaySide, played a huge role in reaching out to him. "It turned out that Troy Baker has been following our game for a while now, and he was very excited to take up this role." Fumi Games Mouse P.I.'s gunplay gameplay between gumshoeing around Sneaking through the vents to get into the opera house, we get to the offices upstairs and find one of the game's set of optional collectibles -- a newspaper, with headlines that Pepper talks about to fill players in on the backstory to flesh out the plot. When our gumshoe walks out the door into the backstage hallways, we're met with enemy goons, and the bullets start flying. A BioShock-style weapon wheel let us switch between a pistol, shotgun and Tommy Gun, which all had enjoyable cartoony reload animations. After cracking a safe with his tail (another fun mouse-themed mechanic), we corner the stage designer, Roland, in the control room overlooking the opera stage to ask about our missing friend, but he's mostly out of answers -- though he says the goons we fought roughed up and replaced the actors. Something is afoot: Roland says the toughs are lining up a prop cannon to fire at mayoral candidate Stilton, who we see in an opera box across the theater -- and Pepper has to race to save his politician friend, who he knows from their time in the Great War. See what I mean about noir staples? Dashing around the backstage areas filled with goons to shoot and stage props, we catch sight of a hook above us leading to another area we can't get to just yet -- when we get the ability to grapple with our tail (as shown in Mouse: P.I.'s earlier trailers), we'll be able to return to this level and grab some extras. In fact, this level has several secrets tucked away in hard-to-reach areas that require some nimble platforming, another feature from old-school shooters. One of these had another of the game's collectibles: a baseball card (of "Brie Ruth," har har), which can be used in a tabletop baseball minigame playable in the hub area between levels. In addition to baseball cards, newspapers can be gathered to fill the player in on the game's world. Fumi Games As Krzemień played, I asked how they got the animation to work. In the old cartoons, the entire background is slightly blurry, but if something is supposed to move in a second, then it slightly stands out from the background, which Fumi Games replicated. "This is what we're going for with outlines, certain shaders and also most of the interactive elements like save [spots], barrels and whatnot. They tend to bounce a bit, jump a bit, just to give you a feeling of, OK, I can interact with that," Krzemień said. Players will be able to toggle on or off the optional effects that make the game feel like it's straight out of the 1930s, like the visual filter of film grain. The audio filters that make it sound like the music is coming from a wax cylinder will still be in the game too, Krzemień assured me. (He first teased these when we chatted at Gamescom 2024 last August.) Just in time, Pepper makes it to the opera stage and moves the cannon, which goes off and wrecks the house. Despite the theater crumbling around us in a fiery inferno and more goons who don't know when to quit, we make it out, only to find Roland the stage manager, who points us in the right direction to hunt down our magician friend. Climbing in the car, the level ends. Fumi Games From exploding barrels to a turpentine gun that melts enemies (turpentine being a solvent used to wipe animation cells in the old hand-drawn days), Mouse P.I. is a flavorful mix of shooter tropes and platforming, punny gags and hardboiled noir. It's obviously impossible to gauge whether the rest of the game will live up to the promise of the art style, but it's clear that the devs have very thoughtfully adapted a classic art style to modern first-person shooters with, I can only imagine, a ton of work to get it right. Mouse P.I. For Hire is coming later this year for PC, Xbox, PS5, PS4 and Nintendo Switch.
