Noir: Last News

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The desert will again be a hotbed of deceit and larceny in luxurious black-and-white as the Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festival returns to Palm Springs this Thursday through Sunday, with the quintessential noir classics “The Killing” and “Double Indemnity” bookending a marathon weekend that otherwise tends toward more rarely screened ‘40s and ‘50s titles. Several sons or daughters of the original actors or directors will be on hand, but of special interest to festival attendees will be the presence of one of the actual filmmakers: James B. Harris, 94, Stanley Kubrick’s producing partner for several of his best early films, who’ll be able to speak first-hand about the making of 1955’s “The Killing,” the crime drama that turned out to be Kubrick’s first real masterpiece.

Emiliano De Pablos Spanish public broadcaster RTVE has struck a VOD deal with Walter Presents to bring noir thriller series “Sequía” (“The Drought”) to the U.S, U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and Canada. The suspense series is co-produced by Spanish and Portuguese public broadcasters RTVE and RTP, in collaboration with Atlantia Media and Coral Europa.  “The Drought” is set in a small submerged village on the Spanish-Portuguese border that re-emerges from a huge dam built in the 1990s after a severe drought. Two skeletons are also unearthed, revealing evidence of a bloody crime. 

EXCLUSIVE: MRC has made a deal to develop Pornsak Pichetshote’s Eisner Award-winning graphic novel bestseller The Good Asian into a series. James Wan, Michael Clear and Rob Hackett are producing for Atomic Monster. Will Rowbotham and Luke Maxwell are producing for 3 Arts. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic There’s a parched austerity to the landscape of the Australian outback, along with an embedded history of conflict between Indigenous and invading occupants, that makes it irresistibly well-suited to screen westerns. But there’s a loneliness to it, too, a sense that its quiet vastness could swallow you whole and without trace, that lends itself as easily to moody, smoky mystery. Aboriginal filmmaker Ivan Sen has twice before dabbled in the harsh, dry space where those genre possibilities overlap, in his features “Goldstone” and “Mystery Road.” In his latest, most accomplished film “Limbo,” he once more surveys the region with a critical eye, finding a history of racial injustice in its sharp cracks and long shadows. But the genre styling this time has been pushed all the way to stark, monochromatic stylization. This is outback noir — oblique, secretive and as hard-boiled as the ground is hard-baked — and Sen wears it well.

Nordic programmer Viaplay has launched a streaming service in the U.S., delivering subscribers thousands of hours of programming for $5.99 a month.

Christopher Vourlias The crime noir genre gets a distinctly South African twist in the new series “Donkerbos,” which premiered its first episodes this week as part of the Berlinale Series Market Selects lineup at the European Film Market. The show begins when the bodies of six children are found in the forests of a provincial backwater town, and a local detective (Erica Wessels) is called in to investigate the shocking crimes. But as the series unfolds, she’s forced to wrestle with her dark past, her family and a distrustful community to catch the killer before another child is taken. Written and directed by Nico Scheepers, “Donkerbos” is produced by Nagvlug Films and sold globally by MultiChoice, which bowed the show last year on its SVOD platform Showmax.

Jessica Kiang Syrupy red blood oozing between champing white teeth: If there’s a signature image in Jennifer Reeder’s “Perpetrator,” that might just be it. It’s a striking horror motif but, jumbled in amongst so many other striking horror motifs — nose splints and tattered school uniforms, bloodied fishnet stockings and features-blurring plastic facemasks — by the third or fourth repetition, it loses its visceral punch. As with so much else in Reeder’s overstuffed but underpowered third feature, the oral hemorrhaging is a fetishized detail that seems to have come unstuck from what it might mean. Is it vampirism? Lycanthropy? Psychokinesis? Acute gingivitis? Who’s to say, and, more to the point, why to care?

Christopher Vourlias “Perpetrator,” director Jennifer Reeder’s provocative new horror noir that she describes as a “celebration of the girl gone wild,” world premieres Feb. 17 in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival. Written and directed by Reeder, “Perpetrator” follows an impulsive teenage girl who must unlock a mysterious power to survive when the young women in her town continue to go missing. The film stars Kiah McKirnan (“Mare of Easttown”), Christopher Lowell (“My Best Friend’s Exorcism”), Melanie Liburd (“The Idol”), Ireon Roach (“Candyman”), and Alicia Silverstone (“Clueless”). It is produced by Gregory Chambet for WTFilms and Derek Bishé for Divide/Conquer.

A live-action Spider-Man Noir series based on the Marvel comic is in development at Amazon, Deadline has learned.

Seeing the nifty grifter drama Sharper reminded me how rarely we encounter this kind of clever cat-and-mouse game that might fall into the noirish genre but really relies on diving into a world filled with characters who reveal slices of their lives that keep changing moment to moment. It is the kind of movie I find enormously difficult to review because its ultimate success for a viewer is just watching it unfold, beat by beat, never quite knowing exactly where it is heading but still glued to the screen to find out.

A pandemic and the closure of cinemas didn’t stop Cannes Film Festival-winning Nicolas Winding Refn from creating, the Drive filmmaker hunkering down with his family to make the new noir Netflix series Copenhagen Cowboy which drops on Thursday, January 5.

EXCLUSIVE: Silence has been golden for Tamara Lawrance who, paired with Wakanda Forever’s Letitia Wright in The Silent Twins, won the best joint lead performance trophy at the recent BIFA awards. 

Emiliano De Pablos Globoplay, the streaming platform of Latin American TV giant Globo, has picked up Brazilian rights to police noir thriller series “Motel Valkirias,” a Spain-Portugal co-production handled by Onza Distribution.  Created by Ghaleb Jaber Martínez, writer-producer of Netflix’s Galician TV drama hit “O Sabor das Margaridas,” the series is directed by Álex Sampaio (Schibare”) and Jorge Quiroga (“Atras das Nuvens”). In post-production, the eight episode 50-minute “Motel Valkirias” is set in a cross-border motel between Galicia and Portugal, following three women with financial and personal problems who get in serious danger after joining forces to get their hands on some valuable merchandise from a guest in the motel.

BIBI has confirmed to be starring in an upcoming film opposite top actor Song Joong-ki, who led last year’s hit action drama Vincenzo.On September 23, several news outlets reported that BIBI had been cast in the upcoming noir film Hwaran (romanised title) starring Song. Later that day, the film’s distributor Megabox Plus M confirmed, per Hankuk Ilbo, that BIBI would be appearing in the project.Hwaran is said to be a noir film revolving around a cast of characters forced to make dangerous and extreme choices to escape their hellish reality.According to The Korea Herald, Song will star in the role of Chi-gun, the leader of an underground crime organisation who crosses paths with the film’s protagonist, Yun-kyu (Hong Sa-bin), and his sister, played by BIBI.The news arrives shortly after Netflix shared that BIBI had stepped down from her role in the forthcoming second season of apocalyptic thriller Sweet Home, which was originally confirmed just weeks prior.Netflix later cited scheduling conflicts as the reason behind the change, and revealed that another actress had already taken on the as-yet-unnamed role and is in the midst of filming.

World-weary gumshoe Philip Marlowe has been played most famously by Humphrey Bogart but also by James Garner, Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and sundry others. Enter Liam Neeson, 70 this year but still apparently capable of disabling five assailants at once with the right small arms and some smashable furniture in Marlowe, Neil Jordan’s frisky film noir pastiche. He’s in tough company. He also has a tough crowd – film noir purists, who are legion – to please.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent David Zucker and Pat Proft, the veteran American filmmakers behind cult comedy franchises including “The Naked Gun” and “Airplane!,” are set to executive produce a Nordic Noir comedy spoof series called “NoPoFo.” The anthology series is being produced by lkkas’ Creative Studio, a recently-launched Finnish company. BBC Studios Nordics has come on board as a co-producer. Billed as “Nordic Noir meets ‘Police Squad!,‘” the 10-part series follows three elite agents from the Nordic Police Force (NoPoFo) who are tasked with solving the sort of murders that Nordic psychopaths do so well. Each half-hour episode is set in a different Nordic country and features a different cast of supporting characters, including a serial killer who only murders bad heavy rock bands, and an Instagram obsessive who creates ice sculptures out of his victims.

Jessica Kiang It’s kept deliberately vague where precisely Italian music-video director Francesco Carrozzini has set his feature debut, an adaption of the Jo Nesbø bestseller novel “Midnight Sun,” which closed a prestige-laden Venice Film Festival on an improbable note. One leans toward, maybe, Norway? But it could be Iceland or Greenland or any one of those far-flung, fjordy locales that usually turn out to belong to Denmark. It’s not like the language cues help: The dialogue is in English and the grand, windswept coastal landscapes are carefully scrubbed of signage that might, by so much as a single ‘ø,’ betray their provenance. The actors’ nationalities are less use still. Headlined by Italy’s Alessandro Borghi (“The Eight Mountains”), the rest of the cast is stacked with UK talent (Charles Dance, Peter Mullan, Jessica Brown Findlay), though we do know for sure, by the way the sun never sets and the mood is set firmly to “Nordic despair,” that we’re definitely not in either of those countries. Not to worry: Even without understanding exactly where we are, “The Hanging Sun” will feel familiar as a pair of worn-in pyjamas to anyone who has switched on a TV in the last decade. Because really, we’re in Scandiland, an amalgam location of every movie and television show from the recent “Scandi-noir” wave, a place sinister with secrets, seasonal affective disorders and Sarah Lund sweaters. 

EXCLUSIVE: Open Road Films has acquired North American rights to Marlowe, a noir crime thriller that stars Liam Neeson atop an ensemble that includes Diane Kruger, Jessica Lange, Danny Huston, Alan Cumming, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Ian Hart, Colm Meaney, Daniela Melchior and Francois Arnaud. Neil Jordan directed the film from script by The Departed’s William Monahan. The film will be released theatrically December 2 through Open Road/Briarcliff Entertainment.

Angelique Jackson Antonio Fargas (“Starsky and Hutch”) and Stephanie Sigman (“Miss Bala”) have joined star Mike Colter in Tubi’s ‘Murder City,’ the second movie filmed under Village Roadshow Pictures’ Black Noir Cinema franchise, co-founded by NBA great Kevin Garnett. Last December, Variety exclusively announced “Murder City” as one of the first films slated for Black Noir Cinema, a lineup of genre movies developed and produced by Village Roadshow and Tubi, which will exclusively debut on the Fox-owned free streaming platform. Described as a “thrilling contemporary crime story,” the film follows Neil (Colter), a disgraced former cop, who after losing his job on the police force is forced to work with the city’s most notorious — and ruthless — kingpin, Ash (Sigman), to settle the debts of his estranged, deadbeat father, Graham (Fargas), and protect his wife and son.

Dennis Harvey Film CriticThe femme fatale is alive and well in Los Angeles-set indie “No Way Out,” an old-fashioned noir dressed up in the steamy decadence of an erotic thriller. Trouble is, veteran producer Keith Kjarval’s debut solo screenplay doesn’t provide the kind of memorable characters or sharp plotting needed to punch across a dark crime melodrama.

Holly Jones Argentine production company Coruya Cine (“Nocturna: Side A”), led by Javier Díaz, has signed-on to co-produce “The Sugar Girl,” (“La Niña Del Azúcar”) alongside Peru’s AV Films (“Juego Siniestro”). The project, shooting in the remote and sprawling city of Iquitos, will utilize an Amazonian cine noir aesthetic to merge the suspenseful and metaphysical components of four parallel narratives.“The space is being given to tell the stories of others.