AFTER DARK, MY SWEET

USA | 1990 | 35mm | 114 mins.
Director: James Foley
Cast: Jason Patric, Rachel Ward, Bruce Dern
In this sun-baked neo-noir, a former boxer/escapee from a mental hospital (Patric) hooks up with a lonely widow (Ward) and a ne’er-do-well ex-cop (Dern) to hatch a kidnapping plot that goes wrong from the start. Filled with a cavalcade of noir archetypes that are then subverted, After Dark, My Sweet is, along with Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway and Stephen Frears’s The Grifters, among the best adaptations of Jim Thompson novels. “One of the purest and most uncompromising of modern film noir. It captures above all the lonely, exhausted lives of its characters” (Roger Ebert). (BR)