Los Angeles and New York, the American movie capitals, supply inexhaustible and diverse locations, gritty cop pictures and glittering comedies gravitating toward the East Coast, moody films noirs and sun-bleached sexcapades belonging to California.
In his novel Le Soleil noir point (1962; "The Sun a Black Dot"), Charles Nokan of Côte d'Ivoire deals with efforts to bring a nation to freedom.
It's a full-colour noir classic where the sun blazes on the surface and the darkness writhes inside.
For us, there is nothing more romantic than sitting on their patio sipping a glass of bubbles or Pinot Noir and watching the sun set over the hills of Napa Valley.
Film noir in the desert sun, it stars Kirk Douglas as Chuck Tatum, a seedy, down-on-his-luck reporter running on empty in Albuquerque.
"A sun-scorched noir, 'Rampart' tells a familiar story with such visual punch and hustling energy that it comes close to feeling like a new kind of movie," Ms. Dargis wrote in The Times in November.
A sun-scorched noir, "Rampart" tells a familiar story with such visual punch and hustling energy that it comes close to feeling like a new kind of movie, though it's more just a tough gloss on American crime stories past.
This weekend, Square Peg Theatre will be borrowing from Nordic noir for Roseacre (Sat & Sun), a physical theatre show exploring morality and murder.
One recent afternoon at Dry River, for instance, workers carefully plucked individual leaves covering pinot noir stems to increase the sun exposure for the grapes and stems.
He has a plan to persuade a couple of local gangsters (Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks) to invest in a car that will be both Shannon's and the driver's ticket out of their marginal, sun-baked, film noir existence.
That may be a crushingly pretentious thing to say about a filmmaker who shuffles moods, genres and visual palettes with enviable ease, and who can leap from the sun-streaked LAPD noir of "Rampart" (2011) to the gloomy Manhattan neorealism of "Time Out of Mind" (2014) without breaking a sweat.
