Much of the instrumental music rises and falls in singing cadences; more than once, though, Mr. Guo shows off an impressive assimilation of film-noir moodiness and jazzy swing.
At the north end of the valley, 10 miles from Boonville, the Navarro Vineyards tasting room — a barnlike building with redwood walls and green wine bottle chandeliers — serves big, impressive wines: meaty pinot noirs and fruity Alsatian-style whites, surrounded by rose gardens, fountains and a two-acre pen of babydoll sheep, which are used to clear the grapevines of undergrowth.
Far more impressive was D.O.A. (1950), a noir that offered Edmond O'Brien as a businessman slowly dying of poison who is racing against the clock to find out who wanted to kill him and why.
Robert Wise (Born to Kill [1947], The Set-Up [1949]) and Anthony Mann (T-Men [1947], Raw Deal [1948]) each made a series of impressive intermediates, many of them noirs, before graduating to steady work on big-budget productions.
He rapidly moved up the RKO chain as a specialist in film noir, making a succession of impressive pictures, most significantly the noir western Blood on the Moon (1948) and the greatest of all boxing movies, The Set-Up (1949).
(Dargis) 'Gangster Squad' (R, 1 53) This brainless, hopped-up, ultraviolent Los Angeles noir, directed by Ruben Fleischer, assembles an impressive cast (including Sean Penn, Ryan Gosling, Josh Brolin and Emma Stone) and some spiffy period costumes.
There is also "Memento," Christopher Nolan's intense, through-the-looking-glass noir starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano, which was so impressive when it appeared in the Toronto Film Festival that it was invited to compete at Sundance.
One of the most impressive I've tried is this Cristom Pinot Noir, Mt. Jefferson Cuvee 1999.
But I've had hugely impressive wines made from chardonnay (Gusbourne Estate in Kent), pinot noir (as a white by Litmus in Surrey) and pinot gris (West Sussex's Stopham Estate).
Thanks to an impressive lo-fi clip that found its way into the synth noir consciousness, Stelmanis was able to settle into her niche as witch-pop wunderkind.
