After Dark, My Sweet (1990)

One of the purest and most uncompromising of modern films noir. It captures above all the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters.

Nobody trusts anybody, and they're right. Dern, always awkward, has matured into a showpiece of behavioural hairpin bends. Excellent.

Director-cowriter James Foley has given this near-perfect adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel a contempo setting and emotional realism that make it as potent as a snakebite.

A hot-wired crime thriller that captures Thompson's flair for hard action, malicious wit and fevered eroticism.

As the drama circles their inaction, this trio of excellent performances fills the screen with a form of spiritual exhaustion, and the film slumps into noir’s typically happy-clappy comeuppance of failure, betrayal and ruin. But the mood has caught on, and the film, stamped with a stunning visual emptiness, haunts the memory for long after its sour close.