Film soleil

Guide to the modern reconfiguration of film noir, featuring films like Sexy Beast, Reservoir Dogs and Blood Simple.

If film noir is a genre of mid-century black and white urban crime thrillers populated by mysterious women and tortured, hardbitten P.I.s, a world of dark corners, back alleys, trenchcoats and shadows, then film soleil is an adaptation for late-century tastes, using as its most common setting sun-beaten highways cutting mercilessly through the desert, its women in cowboy boots and its men deranged by their biological drives.