10 Gripping Neo-Noirs You Must See Before You Die
1. Brick
The directorial debut of visionary auteur Rian Johnson, Brick is an anachronism stew that takes almost every trope of film noir, turns them inside out and has devilish fun with them in a modern American High School setting. However, its feel is less Veronica Mars than it is a displacement of seminal hard-boiled works such as Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.
In a fabulous bit of Dawson Casting, a dowdy and dishevelled Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Brendan Frye, a loner at San Clemente High School with an uncanny nose for investigation. Following a mysterious and panicked phone call from his ex-girlfriend Emily, who he finds dead shortly afterwards, Brendan insinuates himself into an underground drug ring he believes to be responsible. His quest is not simply to bring the killer to justice (as this is obvious enough), but who orchestrated the killing, "putting her in front of the gun".
Every archetype of film noir is present here with a modern twist - the popular society girl as femme fatale, the assistant vice-principal as ball-busting police chief, the basement-dwelling drug dealer as crime lord. You name it, Brick has it. It's brutal and unflinching, but also a pastiche that retains a real sense of genre-bending fun.