Home › Best noir of the 1990s.
The decade Tarantino changed everything — and also the decade when great noir was happening everywhere else, from Copenhagen to Hong Kong to Germany. The 1990s produced some of the most formally inventive crime films ever made, films that interrogated the genre's conventions even as they deployed them.
You know it. It changed how crime films could be structured.
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Christopher Walken gets out of prison in a fur coat. Abel Ferrara. The style that influenced Tarantino and half of American crime cinema.
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Scorsese. The glamour and then the ugliness of it. Ray Liotta. Layla over the bodies.
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John Woo's Hong Kong masterpiece. Chow Yun-fat as a cop. The hospital sequence is the best action sequence ever filmed — a single extended take running almost half an hour through a hospital under siege.
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Tarantino's most underrated film. Pam Grier as a flight attendant who plays everyone off against each other. Robert Forster as the bail bondsman who falls for her. The money exchange in the mall told three times from three different angles.
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Eight men in a warehouse arguing about who is the police informant. No heist shown. All aftermath. Are you gonna bark all day little doggie, or are you gonna bite.
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Refn in Copenhagen with no budget and complete conviction. A drug dealer has one week. The unglamorous reality of street-level crime.
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Twenty minutes. Three attempts. Lola has to get 100,000 marks to her boyfriend before he does something desperate. Tom Tykwer made a film that is simultaneously a thriller, a philosophical argument about fate and free will, and a technical showcase for what cinema can do.
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Kathryn Bigelow made the best undercover crime film of the decade and it is disguised as a surf movie. Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent infiltrating a gang of surfers who rob banks wearing presidential masks. Patrick Swayze as Bodhi. One of the great charismatic villains.
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Pulp Fiction (1994), GoodFellas (1990), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Jackie Brown (1997), and Run Lola Run (1998) are the essential 1990s crime films.
No — neo-noir predates Tarantino by decades. But Tarantino's influence on 1990s crime cinema was enormous, and Pulp Fiction changed what was possible in terms of structure and tone.