Riffing on early David Mamet or Neil LaBute, writer-director Patrick Stettner's superb three-hander anatomises the airless, amoral culture of top-rank executives. In a faceless airport hotel, high-flyer Stockard Channing plays sadistic sex-and-power games with young business rival Julia Stiles and corporate headhunter Frederick Weller. Sharp, astringent, and proof that complex ideas and strong performances transcend even minimal budgets.
Wim Wenders may be struggling to land a gig these days, but this 1977 noir thriller was his big-screen breakthrough. Adapted from Patricia Highsmith's novel (and remade this month as Ripley's Game, see p145) it finds Dennis Hopper for once understated as art dealer Tom Ripley, who persuades dying Berliner Bruno Ganz to become a hitman.
John Milius' deeply personal take on the surf generation of the '60s is everything you'd expect from Hollywood's last great iconoclast. It's a sumptuous visual feast, an epic journey charting the testosterone-packed lives of three surfing buddies (Jan-Michael Vincent, William Katt and Gary Busey) and an unbelievably heavy-handed extended metaphor, as the ebb and flow of the tide is mirrored in our heroes' lives.
Giuseppe Tornatore's Oscar-winning ode to cinema revolves around a famous film director returning to his native Sicilian village to attend the funeral of a local cinema projectionist who'd befriended him as a young boy and cultivated his love of film. Pure magic.
Detective Kyle Bodine (Ed Harris) meets the unhappily married-to-money Rachel Monro (Madeleine Stowe) and before you can say Body Heat he's dumping the hubby (Charles Dance) in a lake, and his own career along with it. Harris is dependable as ever but Stowe curiously inanimate, leaving China Moon with a central relationship that's about as steamy as a bowl of cold soup.
The James M Cain novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (femme fatale seduces drifter into murdering her husband) has often been revisited: this 1942 Luchino Visconti version, a Scorsese favourite, was considered immoral and subversive on release, yet spawned the Italian neo-realist school. Noir to the core, it's long and fatalistic.
A pair of '70s cops, undercover, become miserably hooked on smack in this impressively unflinching '92 drama. Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh star, both grittily serving notice that they're prepared to sweat, shiver and sacrifice goody-goody mainstream careers. The despair's draining, but its influence was to prove widespread.
Stylish but disturbing French art thriller starring Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle as victims of a drug experiment that's turned them into...uh, sex-crazed cannibals. Dalle turns up the volume on her usual sexy-but-bonkers routine, Gallo is just bonkers and the whole thing is like an extra-gory werewolf movie without the fur. Not one for the squeamish.
Dennis Hopper-directed noir-by-numbers from 1990. Don Johnson's ambiguous stranger drifts into a sultry small town to run a con, and gets caught between lust for married Virginia Madsen and troubled teen Jennifer Connelly. Routine; but cherish this movie for the once-in-a-lifetime soundtrack Hopper persuaded Miles Davis, John Lee Hooker and Taj Mahal to jam.
