Sugar offers sweet then rotten noir
Noir is one of the most difficult genres to get right. As Richard Brody wrote in his definitive New Yorker piece, “‘Film Noir’: The Elusive Genre”: “Film noir is a peculiar genre. A Western is identifiable by people on horseback in the West; a musical involves singing and dancing; a war movie shows war. Even the so-called women’s picture was a movie that featured women prominently. But the directors who worked in film noir didn’t use that term to describe their work.” When we classify a “picture” as film noir, it’s usually because it carries the style and tropes of the classics. But hew too close and a new "noir" is either redundant or parodic; drift too far though and what do you have left?
