Le Samourai (1967)

“Neo-noir is a revival of film noir, a genre that had originally flourished during the post-World War II era in the United States—roughly from 1940 to 1960. The French term, film noir, translates literally to English as ‘dark film’, because they were quite dark both in lighting, but also indicating sinister stories often presented in a shadowy cinematographic style. Neo-noir has a similar style but with updated themes, content, style, and visual elements. The neologism neo-noir, using the Greek prefix for the word new, is defined by Mark Conard as ‘any film coming after the classic noir period that contains noir themes and noir sensibility’. Another definition describes it as later noir that often synthesizes diverse genres while foregrounding the scaffolding of film noir. The classic film noir era is usually dated from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. The…