Like Burt Lancaster dashing through the woods in search of the next pool in "The Swimmer," the 60's suburban-noir classic, the viewer sees only trees and a road winding through them.
In roughly the same period of time, the artist Eric Fischl, also much lauded, has hewn closely to painting, particularly to scenes of what might be described as suburban psycho-noir.
"Lakeview Terrace," directed by Neil LaBute from a script by David Loughery and Howard Korder, belongs to a reasonably familiar subgenre: the suburban psycho-neighbor noir.
There are sixty-nine in all, sixty-nine single-image dramas in which Sherman plays all the roles: primly dressed office worker, small-town librarian, jilted lover, bimbo, film-noir heroine, suburban high schooler, angry housewife (scowling over a broken bag of groceries).
In his cinematic photo-collages of the nineteen-seventies and eighties, film stills advertising B movies or film noirs cohabited with suburban group portraits, landscapes, urban architecture, water sports, mermaids, art history, and surrealist fantasies.
Ditto for a better neo-western (Red Hill, 2010), neo-noir (The Square, 2008), suburban thriller (Snowtown, 2010), police procedural (Noise, 2007) or time travel movie (2014's The Infinite Man).
For its control of narrative, its photography of the vanished suburban California of the 1940s, and for its compelling central performance from Joan Crawford, Michael Curtiz's noir thriller is utterly gripping.
