The Based on a True Crime Boom and Its Ethics

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Somewhere around the launch of Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer series in 2022, the true-crime dramatisation stopped being a genre and became a utility, like true-crime podcasts and true-crime cold-case Reddit threads before it. The Dahmer show topped charts worldwide, and while it did, the sister of one of Dahmer’s victims — Rita Isbell, who had delivered a famous victim-impact statement at the 1992 trial — went on the record to say no one had asked her, and that watching her own courtroom breakdown recreated for streaming felt like being robbed. That is the true-crime boom in one image: enormous profit on one side of the screen, a family that was never consulted on the other. The films and series that survive scrutiny are the ones that took that imbalance seriously before a frame was shot. Most do not.

Neo-Noir's Neon Problem: When Style Stands In for Substance

Sat, 16 Mar 2024 13:00:00 +0000

There is a particular image that neo-noir has spent the last fifteen years falling in love with. A lone figure, half-lit, standing in a corridor or a car or a hotel room bathed in aggressive magenta and cyan, holding a pose while a synthesiser throbs on the soundtrack. It is a gorgeous image. It has launched a thousand posters and ten thousand Instagram grids. And it is the exact point where the modern crime film keeps getting into trouble, because that image is doing so much work to feel meaningful that a filmmaker can forget to make it be meaningful. This is neon-noir’s central problem, and it is worth diagnosing precisely, because the same technique that produces the genre’s best recent work also produces its emptiest.

Crime Cinema - vo.rs

The Based on a True Crime Boom and Its Ethics

Neo-Noir's Neon Problem: When Style Stands In for Substance