Neo-noir — the post-1965 cinema that engages and updates the working visual and narrative conventions of the 1940s-50s American film-noir tradition — has produced one of the most-distinctive contemporary cinematic categories.
Neo-noir is the post-1965 cinematic category that engages and updates the working visual and narrative conventions of the 1940s-50s American film-noir tradition. The category is, by general convention, distinguished from classical noir by its colour cinematography (rather than the black-and-white of classical noir) and by its structural awareness of the noir tradition (rather than the classical-noir films' status as the first instantiation of the tradition). Neo-noir films are, in some sense, in conversation with their classical noir predecessors in ways that classical noir cannot be in conversation with anything that preceded it.
The category emerged in roughly the late-1960s and early-1970s American cinema. The structural foundations include the broader New Hollywood movement, the colour-cinematography normalisation in mainstream commercial production, and the willingness of the post-1965 director generation to engage genre conventions self-consciously rather than producing them unselfconsciously as their immediate predecessors had. The contemporary canonical neo-noir works extend from Chinatown (1974) through contemporary production.
Chinatown (1974) is the foundational neo-noir entry. Roman Polanski's Los Angeles-set period drama, written by Robert Towne and starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar and was nominated for ten additional Oscars including Best Picture. The film's specific working approach — period-setting noir conventions in colour cinematography with awareness of the classical-noir tradition — established the structural template subsequent neo-noir cinema would extend. The Long Goodbye (1973), Robert Altman's Raymond Chandler adaptation with Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe, operates as the more-explicitly-deconstructive companion piece to Chinatown's more-reverent engagement.
The 1980s extended the neo-noir framework into substantial commercial production. Body Heat (1981) — Lawrence Kasdan's directorial debut, William Hurt and Kathleen Turner — is the major early-1980s entry. Blade Runner (1982) extended neo-noir into science fiction. Blood Simple (1984), the Coen brothers' directorial debut, brought neo-noir into independent production. Mona Lisa (1986), Neil Jordan's British neo-noir, extended the framework internationally. The Last Seduction (1994) extended the femme-fatale neo-noir into the 1990s.
LA Confidential (1997) is, by general critical consensus, the most-significant late-1990s neo-noir. Curtis Hanson's James Ellroy adaptation won the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. The film is structurally foundational for the subsequent period-set neo-noir production that has continued through contemporary commercial cinema. Memento (2000), Christopher Nolan's reverse-chronology narrative, extends neo-noir into structural-experimentation territory. Mulholland Drive (2001), David Lynch's Los Angeles-set surrealist neo-noir, extends the category into art-cinema territory. Drive (2011), Nicolas Winding Refn's Los Angeles-set neo-noir with Ryan Gosling, extends the category into the 2010s.
Brick (2005), Rian Johnson's high-school-set neo-noir, demonstrated the category's continued capacity for indie-cinema reinvention. The film operates almost entirely within the structural conventions of classical hard-boiled noir but transposes them into contemporary American high-school setting in ways that produce surprising dramatic energy. The Coen brothers' subsequent neo-noir work — Fargo (1996), The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), No Country for Old Men (2007) — has produced some of the most-significant contemporary entries in the category.
The most-recommended entry-point neo-noir is Chinatown for the foundational 1970s template, LA Confidential for the contemporary major-studio template, Blade Runner for the science-fiction extension, and Mulholland Drive for the art-cinema extension. The category continues active production across multiple national cinemas; the underlying conventions have proven sufficiently flexible to support continued cinematic engagement across multiple decades.