A contemporary example of films carrying on the characteristic tradition of film noir, with dark subject matter, darker photography, and angst-ridden characters struggling to bear the immensity of their modern lives. A revisitation to the conceits of that original movement, but without the stigma of the Hays Code, exercising the new full potential of sexuality, violence, and moral ambiguity. A reflexive film that navigates the complexities of the film noir movement to some effect, either thoughtful or comedic. All of these define the fundamentally unstable concept of neo-noir. It can be the hybridization of film noir and another genre, as with science fiction films in Dark City and Alphaville. The genre has been parodied in films such as The Big Lebowski and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid. Noir has even been worked into blockbuster material with The Dark Knight and Watchmen. A link between noir and the supernatural is explicit in films like The Ninth Gate and Angel Heart, and the connection to the subconscious is explored in Mulholland Dr. and Only God Forgives. Sometimes a film lovingly embraces it's noir heritage, like Sin City, and sometimes the heritage is analyzed thoroughly, as in The Man Who Wasn't There. If noir is the cinema of modernism, perhaps neo-noir is the cinema of post-modernism, taking its predecessor's interest in the struggles of the individual, and chopping it to bits. Pulp Fiction focuses on a series of characters, Lost Highway is about one character that may be two, and Memento focuses on a man who must be constantly reinventing himself from one moment to the next. Maybe neo-noir is simply the term for films of the noir spirit continuing past the 1950s, with Taxi Driver exploring issues of Vietnam, Homicide exploring Jewish heritage, or Blue Steel confronting feminist issues. Perhaps they're films that explore issues from the film noir era that filmmakers did not have the freedom to express at the time, such as Italian Fascism in The Conformist, or race in Devil in a Blue Dress. Of course, such themes reach back into the sidelines of the film noir period, with films like Sapphire, or the hip new self-reflexive points of the Nikkatsu noir films, or Akira Kurosawa's take on crime stories in High and Low. Many famous directors have attempted to mold the elements of noir into something new: Robert Altman's deconstruction efforts on The Long Goodbye, Ridley Scott's world-building in Blade Runner, Jean-Pierre Melville's philosophically-charged masterpieces, Lars von Trier's mind-bendingly expressionistic psychological horror story of The Element of Crime, or Paul Thomas Anderson's noir character study in Hard Eight. Noir has moved, mangled and confused, through the sixties (Mickey One, The Killers, Point Blank), into the New Hollywood decade of the 70s where it was pared down and taken in a dozen different directions in order to explore the underground (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Night Moves, The American Friend). It hit it's stride again in the sweaty, sultry excess of the 80s; with vibrant new color palettes, the neon shadow of noir could finally be realized in its full elegance (Body Heat, Mona Lisa, The Hit). It became fittingly grungy in the 90s (Se7en, Crash, Palmetto), beginning to focus less on the criminal, more on the insane, before becoming almost entirely reflexive in the 2000s (Brick, Max Payne, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead). With films like Drive and Trance continuing to be released soaked in noir aesthetics, it's apparent that the spirit is long from abated, and a new wave of reincarnations is sure to emerge and define itself, joining the legacy of these films that each serve to sketch out the cultural histories of their time periods in the very same way that film noir became emblematic of it's own.