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Hmmmm ... nasty. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City is a flagrant pulp noir, a deeply unwholesome guignol fantasy based on Miller's graphic novels, populated by cops and tough guys eagerly fighting in the war on paedophilia, sadism and general wrongdoing, but often on the wrong side. The movie's opening credits holler that it has been "shot and cut" by Robert Rodriguez, making it sound like a serial killer's umpteenth victim. I first saw it at Cannes, in a bleary, jaded mood at the tail-end of the week, and found myself unresponsive. The sheer brilliance of the movie's style, however, has to be conceded on a second viewing.

Sin City is set in a retro-future urban sprawl with a forested hinterland in which creepy blade-toting sickos turn innocent people into tagliatelli - a quasi-LA from both the 1940s and the present day, with automobiles of confusingly various vintage zooming up and down its pitch-black highways. People have cellphones, but the men unselfconsciously use the quaint term "dames".

Everything is constructed digitally and composed in a starkly defined monochrome on which splashes of lurid colour show up like wounds. Someone's eyes, or their lips, or their sneakers, or more probably their blood, are lividly painted on to the Weegee-photo-style black and white. Rodriguez splatters that claret around like Jackson Pollock, but sometimes it's not red but an expressionist molten yellow, and often a gunshot wound will show up glowing white, as if transformed into a splodge of radioactive birdcrap.

The action breaks down into three stories, the first and third creepily echoing each other's tale of an older man having a fascination for a younger woman who in turn has a deeply improbable tendresse for him. Under a massive facial prosthetic - almost certainly not a postmodern joke at the expense of his own cosmetic surgery - Mickey Rourke plays Marv, an ugly tough guy. He's the beast whose beauty is a prostitute who takes pity on him and gives him the night of his life, gratis. But she is killed by a psycho with a disturbing resemblance to Spiderman's alter ego, Peter Parker, and enraged by the subsequent cover-up involving politicians, cops and even the church, Marv goes on an orgiastic killing spree in the name of vengeance.

Marv's counterpart is Hartigan, a police officer on the verge of retirement played by Bruce Willis, who like Marv is on medication, in his case for an ironically failing heart. On his last day on the job, Hartigan submits to a three-quarter-life crisis and throws away the rule book in his grim determination to nail a crazed madman. Exactly like Marv's enemy, this vicious killer is a well-connected little punk, and like Marv, the righteous Hartigan gets a frame-up and a jail sentence. But the person whom Hartigan is trying to save is an 11-year-old girl who in a very queasy scene thanks her protector for saving her life and her virginity and grows up to be a slinky babe, played by Jessica Alba, who sets about seducing him.

Are these mirror-image tales intended to offer ironic perspectives on each other? Or does Frank Miller just have a very limited number of ideas that turn him on? Either way, Marv and Hartigan's lives are more interesting than the middle storyline, in which toughly laconic Dwight (Clive Owen) makes common cause with the pouting prostitutes of Sin City, who are all martial arts specialists, led by Rosario Dawson, against a corrupt cop played by Benicio Del Toro. On first viewing, the hookers looked like a boy's-own porn fantasy. Maybe porn nightmare is closer to the mark. Either way, these attack-mode lingerie models certainly hold their own with the menfolk in the mayhem department. But the effect is silly and tacky rather than scary or sexy.

And, sadly, it is within this weak section that Rodriguez's friend and admirer Quentin Tarantino guest-directs a segment, showing Owen having to drive along with a corpse in the front passenger seat. It is a weak echo of the ghastly auto-accident of Pulp Fiction. Moreover, there is no one in this film, man or woman, with the charisma of Uma Thurman's avenger in Tarantino's magnificent Kill Bill movies, which, however bizarre, had a life of their own, whereas Sin City has a borrowed life of someone else's. The comic-book style, the stark framing, the Runyonesque dialogue, the hallucinatory design and strange mix of heartless gore and choked-up sentiment are all meticulously imitated rather than lived. There is, in the movie world, a bit of a cultural cringe at the moment to the idea of ultra-cool graphic novels as source material. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell didn't work out. Sin City is certainly better, but not by that much.

Rodriguez himself has certainly come a long way since the no-budget debut triumph of El Mariachi in 1992. He is now the maestro of the blue-screen, getting his performers to strut their stuff in a void - and with some auteurist dash he produces, edits, photographs and even composes the score. Probably only he could have brazened out this geekily hi-tech adventure into the male dark side, but it would be good to see him make a movie with recognisably human dimensions.
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Hmmmm ... nasty. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City is a flagrant pulp noir, a deeply unwholesome guignol fantasy based on Miller's graphic novels, populated by cops and tough guys eagerly fighting in the war on paedophilia, sadism and general wrongdoing, but often on the wrong side.

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LA Confidential (1997), directed by Curis Hanson and starring Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe Kevin Spacey and Kim Basinger

Lesser men than Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson would have baulked at adapting LA Confidential for the screen. Like most of James Ellroy's work, his 1990 cop thriller - the third of his Fifties-set "LA Quartet" - has too many plotlines for a single film, too much nastiness for most cinemagoers' stomachs.

Yet the two screenwriters forged ahead, and, although they purged several of the book's harsher elements (such as a memorably warped serial killer known as Dr Frankenstein), they nevertheless delivered a screenplay that has sex, drugs, death, obsession and corruption coursing through its veins.

Nor, for all their inevitable simplification of the novel, is the movie (directed by Hanson) an easy one. Even on a second or third viewing, its multiple plot threads demand rapt attention. Blink once and you'll fall behind the police as they investigate the grisly multiple murder at the Night Owl diner; keep your eyes peeled, and you'll be rewarded with the richest view of LA's less angelic side since Roman Polanski's Chinatown.

At heart, LA Confidential is also an unusually clever buddy movie. Three cops try to solve the killings: 's ambitious young hot-shot, Kevin Spacey's cynical celebrity, and Russell Crowe's hot-headed bruiser. The first two are getting on famously, until, in one of the all-time great screen deaths, Spacey is suddenly gunned down.

For three-quarters of the 138-minute movie, Pearce and Crowe express nothing but full-blooded loathing for each other, yet their belated pairing up is a convincing one, and - remarkably, given their homelands - there's not an Antipodean twang to be heard.

Along with the rest of the cast (in particular, Kim Basinger), the three leads are just superb: Pearce green but cunning, Spacey self-loathing but droll, Crowe ferocious but fragile. The trio all look eminently of the Fifties, an era sublimely captured in Jeannine Claudia Oppewall's production design and Dante Spinotti's cinematography (never better than in the climactic shoot-out, a masterpiece of ballistic choreography).

A typically great score by Jerry Goldsmith adds the final pinch of both glamour and grit to this dark, delicious broth.

LA Confidential is on ITV4 at 11.05pm on New Year's Eve

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LA Confidential, review: 'dark and delicious'

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LA Confidential (1997), directed by Curis Hanson and starring Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe Kevin Spacey and Kim Basinger Lesser men than Brian Helgeland and Curtis Hanson would have baulked at adapting LA Confidential for the screen.

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The old Hollywood Studio System produced many great works of art from the eternal fable of The Wizard of Oz to the harsh poetry of director John Ford's westerns. Out of this creative environment came film noir, a style of movie-making that became very popular in the 1940's and 1950's.

Noir filmmakers used shadowy black and white cinematography and inventive camera angles to make movies filled with crime, lust, betrayal, and the darkness in the human heart. The noir style encompassed many types of films: there are of course murder-mysteries and heist movies, but noirs were also social problem movies, women's pictures and even science fiction.

Today, film noir is more popular than ever. In recent years, classic movie fans have dedicated November, or "Noirvember" if you want to use the social media hashtag, as a month for the study and appreciation of noir, so without further ado here's 10 great movies that shaped the history of American film.

Just a note on the name film noir: This term, which means black film, was coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946. Most 40's and 50's audiences would not have been familiar with the phrase; instead they would have called these movies murder mysteries and crime movies.

The Maltese Falcon (1941, John Huston)

There's a great deal of debate among film scholars about the first true noir, but, there's no argument that the first significant film in the noir style is The Maltese Falcon. Director John Huston's classic stars Humphrey Bogart as world weary detective Sam Spade, who battles corrupt cops, a gang of thugs, and one wily femme fatale ( Mary Astor) to avenge his partner's death and solve the mystery of the falcon.

Based on Dashiell Hammett's popular detective novel, The Maltese Falcon sets the standard for future noirs with shadowy night cinematography, a convoluted story line, a cynical hero and a colorful supporting cast that features great character actors like Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook Jr, and Sydney Greenstreet.

Double Indemnity (1944, Billy Wilder)

The United States entry into World War II in late 1941 halted the development of mainstream noir movies, while the studios focused on making patriotic fare like Yankee Doodle Dandy and Mrs. Miniver. However, maverick screenwriter and director Billy Wilder wasn't afraid to go his own way with an adaptation of James M. Cain's potboiler novel Double Indemnity. The source material was considered so trashy that Wilder's writing partner quit in protest ( Wilder replaced him with crime novelist Raymond Chandler), and he had a difficult time persuading stars Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck to sign on as a sleazy insurance agent and his married lover.

Wilder also battled the motion picture censors who nitpicked everything from the script to the length of bath towel Stanwyck wears in her first scene (the towel "should certainly go below her knees" censor Joseph Breen fussed in a studio memo). Once the movie was released, all of these troubles were forgotten. Audiences had grown tired of wholesome fare, and they flocked to see this seamy tale of the dark undercurrents of suburban American life.

Detour (1945, Edgar Ulmer)

While the major studios were largely overlooking the noir style, the poverty row studios were churning out cheaply made noirs with a bare bones budget and little known actors. One of the best of these B-movies is , a 68 minute thrill ride from criminally underrated director Edgar Ulmer, about a cross-country hitchhiker ( Tom Neal) who has a bizarre encounter in the Arizona desert that turns into a living nightmare. In many ways, these B-movies are some of the best examples of the noir style. The cheap sets and production designs forced directors to be creative with cinematography and camera angles. Also, the motion picture censors were not as strict, which allowed B-movies more freedom to cover taboo subjects.

Gilda (1946, Charles Vidor)

Film noir became mainstream in the postwar period. Studios were now willing to sink lots of cash into lavish noirs with big stars. One of the best of the big budget noirs is , featuring Rita Hayworth in an iconic performance as the ultimate femme fatale. Gilda features lush cinematography by Rudolph Mate, gorgeous costumes from Jean Louis, and Hayworth 's show-stopping "Put the Blame on Mame" number.

Out of the Past (1947, Jacques Tourneur)

By 1947, American moviegoers were spoiled for choice with a glut of top-notch noirs appearing in cinemas. One week they could view Orson Welles' experimental classic, The Lady from Shanghai and then return next week for the low-budget thrills of Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome.

Even among these first rate noirs, director Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past stands alone. It is simply one of the best American films ever made, with Robert Mitchum creating the definitive noir anti-hero as private detective turned gas station owner Jeff Bailey. Even more, Out of the Past is a profound meditation on fate and identity and how we can never escape the shadows in our past.

The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)

By the late 1940's, noir's influence had spread beyond Hollywood. Many filmmakers outside the United States were experimenting with the noir style, most notably British director Carol Reed. The best of Reed's noirs is The Third Man, the story of a naive American novelist ( Joseph Cotten) who visits postwar Vienna to reconnect with his childhood friend Harry Lime ( Welles). Reed uses that simple plot to craft a masterpiece of cinematic formalism using the bombed-out streets of the Austrian capital as the setting for a film filled with a dreamlike landscape of light and shadow.

Border Incident (1949, Anthony Mann)

As the noir style became more popular, its boundaries expanded into other genres like the woman's picture and even the western. Director Anthony Mann's noir Border Incident is a modern western about illegal immigration along the US/Mexican border. This movie is still quite relevant today with a fast-paced plot about two undercover agents ( Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy) who attempt to break up an illegal, but highly profitable human trafficking operation. Mann and cinematographer John Alton use the sparse Southwestern landscape to create images of stark beauty and sheer terror.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950, John Huston)

One of the great innovations of 50's noir was the heist movie. There were many great heist capers during the decade, including Kansas City Confidential and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, but Huston's The Asphalt Jungle is the granddaddy of them all.

The movie is a taut thriller about a group of Midwestern low lives and criminals who band together to pull off a complicated jewel theft. Terrific performances abound, especially from Sam Jaffe as a criminal mastermind, and a young Marilyn Monroe. But the film's pièce de résistance is a lengthy, suspenseful scene of the gang pulling off the heist itself.

Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder)

Noir turned decadent in the 1950's with big name directors like Vincente Minnelli and Alfred Hitchcock transforming the genre to suit their own particular obsessions. Wilder's corrosive Hollywood satire Sunset Boulevard is among the best of these films.

The image of hapless screenwriter Joe Gillis ( William Holden) floating dead in silent film star Norma Desmond's ( Gloria Swanson) swimming pool is one of the most crackling opening scenes in any noir. Wilder never lets up from there, taking viewers on a wild ride that includes Cecil B. DeMille, a chimpanzee funeral, and the most memorable staircase descent in movie history.

Kiss Me Deadly (1955, Robert Aldrich)

By the late 1950's, noir had largely run its course. There would still be a few proto-noirs produced in the 1960's and 1970's ( is a good example of this type of film), but the noir style largely ran out of steam. Instead, audiences sought new thrills with teen movies, lavish epics, and low budget horror films. One of the last great noirs was Kiss Me Deadly, which is based on Mickey Spillane's pulp novel.

While the book was about illegal drugs in the L.A. criminal underworld, director Robert Aldrich changed the plot into a cold war parable of nuclear destruction. Detective Mike Hammer ( Ralph Meeker) is very much in the Sam-Spade mold of punch first and ask questions later, but this private eye stumbles across something much worse than the theft of a black bird. In a bravura final scene, Kiss Me Deadly moves from noir into science fiction; Hammer unwittingly sets off a nuclear apocalypse, and in this most nihilistic of noirs, an art form that began in shadows fades into black.

If you're new to noir, these 10 films above are a great introduction, but don't stop there. I've just scratched the surface of the many masterpieces that noir has to offer.
What are your favorite film noirs? Who are your favorite actors and directors in the film noir genre?
(top image: The Third Man - source: British Lion Films)

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The old Hollywood Studio System produced many great works of art from the eternal fable of The Wizard of Oz to the harsh poetry of director John Ford's westerns. Out of this creative environment came film noir, a style of movie-making that became very popular in the 1940's and 1950's.

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Netflix's Jessica Jones is one of the most complex treatments of agency in the wake of victimhood that the small screen has seen yet seen. A grim show, shadowy and hopeless and unlikeable, it's finally less about trauma than it is a murky contest between revenge and rehabilitation and the term that floats between those: responsibility.

Its villain Kilgrave, played by David Tennant, has the power of mind control and is as legally blameless as he is morally monstrous. Jones, a New York detective with superpowers played by Breaking Bad's Krysten Ritter, spent time in his thrall, during which he made her do terrible things, and now he's back in her life, a year after his apparent death.

It's a testament to the subtlety of Kilgrave's psychopathic villainy that he sometimes includes a command to feel as well as to act. Given the gruesome parade of victims smashing their heads through posts or stabbing themselves with scissors, it's an easy detail to overlook; the occasional allusion to pleasure is almost charmingly forgettable. But it happens: "I'm going to be your guest here indefinitely," he says to a family. "You'll be delighted."

It's this last bit, this mention of delight, that complicates the show's treatment of moral and emotional agency. Kilgrave's pronouncement seems to work: his hostess does seem delighted. She smiles. But smiles are high-stakes events in Jessica Jones. Kilgrave's obsession with smiling is a pointed comment on the widespread phenomenon of men hectoring women to smile on the street, and the point of the comparison is to drive home that the difference between "be happy" and "look happy" is vast.

Here is Jones performing "being in love" at his behest:

Here's a real smile, when she's "free" for 18 seconds and thinks of leaving him:

Here for the sake of contrast, is one of the photos she agrees to send Kilgrave so he'll spare Malcolm, the junkie neighbour Jones wants to help - in one of the strangest uses of the "selfie" to date:

Those 18 seconds of freedom in the yellow dress are fleeting: Kilgrave calls her back, and when she hesitates to follow his command, he hands her a knife.

She slices into her ear and he stops her, saying "It's all right. I'm here. I'll always be here."

The flashback shows how brutally Jones was forced to "punish herself" whenever her obedience flagged, and the scene that provokes it is exceptionally rare. How often do we see a rape survivor confronting her rapist and decimating the gaslighting he uses to avoid the word? He took her to five-star hotels, he says. He bought her things.

"I didn't want any of it," she says.

This scene comes in episode 10, and the amount of political and philosophical work it does is frankly exhausting. If it dramatises how he-said, she-said accounts arise by showing the how abuser and victim remember the same event, it also exposes how emotional manipulation convinces the abuser too. ("What revisionist bullshit!" he says of her account, until she shows him her literal scars.)

Within the show's rules, the scene establishes that Jones's self-annihilation is a direct response to the horrifying revelation that she remembers everything perfectly - and how she felt while it was happening. This means that Kilgrave's victims aren't - despite appearances - automatons or zombies. It would be better, perhaps, if they were. Instead, they're aware, trapped under the glass. They can feel. They can see. And there is no achieving a clean separation between him and them:

Jessica Jones: Kilgrave's heroin(e). Photograph: Netflix

This suggests that Kilgrave's power isn't "mind control" at all, but something more limited but also, paradoxically, more invasive. Let's start with his limits, which are clear and almost virtuosically sad: Kilgrave can compel behaviour and obedience, but he can't elicit desire or belief or love. "I had to force people to care for me!" he screams at his parents, who abandoned him. It's a loaded word: the care he achieved was material, not emotional.

His unwillingness to seek genuine consent from others stems from an almost insurmountable inability to produce the circumstances that make consent possible. And why would he? If almost everyone on the show is an addict, he is too: the giant pun around which the show functions - jonesing - is that Jones is his heroin(e). His impatience waiting for her to wake up in her childhood home is an antsy symptom of withdrawal, and when he goes in search of a bigger high, his failure is catastrophically sad. Even at the height of his powers, his father - compelled to be honest - tells him the truth, and it's a truth Kilgrave is powerless to change: even Kilgrave's father wants him to die.

These are limitations, to be sure, but they spray out like shrapnel, causing soft tissue damage. That a part of Jones remained conscious while under Kilgrave's control is not a relief. If Kilgrave refuses general anesthesia during his kidney transplant, he denies the same loss of consciousness to his victims. They are forced to witness what they've done and experience it as something they did themselves. They will not escape guilt, and they will never stop wondering what part of themselves made their obedience to Kilgrave possible.

If this sounds familiar, it's because, however exceptional Kilgrave's power seems, the moral quagmire it produces is all too common. It's the condition of the rape victim who had an orgasm during her assault. It's the condition of the soldier trained to kill when he suspects his targets are innocent. It's the condition of the battered woman who goes back to her abuser and stays "of her own free will". It's the condition of police asked to attack protesters, of the alcoholic or drug addict who knows, intellectually, that he can stop, but doesn't. It's the condition of Anastasia Steele from Fifty Shades of Grey and of any person, really, who agrees, whatever the context, to consent to forgo consent in the future.

The problem, for victims struggling to tease out their own desires from the things they were forced to do, is that the focus they mustered while on a mission for Kilgrave felt like desire. Was it? Jones agonises over this - her discovery of her resistance to Kilgrave's power raises the possibility that, since if was developing right around the time of Reva's death, maybe she wanted to kill her? She will suggest later to Luke that her desire not to kill Reva helped her break free of Kilgrave, but this is a fragile explanation.

The question is where the will fits in. The Jessica Jones universe takes that question - the matter of responsibility - more seriously than most.

There's precious little clarity, however: everyone is responsible somehow, and no matter how much Jones insists to Malcolm (for example) that his surveillance of her is not his fault, he argues that it is: he knew he was continuing to do it for the drugs, even after Kilgrave's power ended. Kilgrave's power more than anything resembles that of an unbelievably effective boss, the kind who makes everyone subordinate their agendas to his. There is a salary of sorts - bosses are good at creating dependencies - but he's above all the kind of person who makes you want to say "mission accomplished", even if it was never your mission.

This is the problem any employee tasked with "giving it their all" has faced: the invitation to link your personal feelings of success up to the abstract impersonal requirements of a job. When you're tasked with doing something repugnant, how much of your impulses and wishes do you accidentally enlist and therefore contaminate? (It is also, of course, the ultimate superhero problem: the difference between a villain and a superhero is that a villain gets to set his own agenda.)

The craving for Kilgrave's validation is strong. "I couldn't stop," Trish says, horrified, after Jones finds her trying to slam a bullet into her head, pursuant to Kilgrave's instructions. (Jones puts the bullet in her mouth in a "letter-of-the-law" hail mary. It works and deactivates the order.)

Photograph: Netflix

What's interesting is that Jones performs an innocent version here of what Kilgrave did to her in the flashback, when he stopped her from cutting off her own ear and acted like her savior. "It's OK, it's OK," they both say. It's an interesting repetition because that flashback scene mirrors another man in the Jessica Jones world. I'm talking, of course, about Simpson's confession to Trish that he lit his sister's Barbie dream house on fire in order for his GI Joes to come to the rescue and put the fire out. "You torched a Dream House?" Trish says, and we know this doesn't bode well.

Simpson explains that he was committed to the realism of the scenario. His men melted into a giant blob. When Trish points out the losses his men sustained to "save" Barbie, his joke is telling:

Photograph: Netflix

The mission was never to save: it was to create an emergency that would make saving necessary. Kilgrave wasn't Simpson's first exposure to mind control - he was already brainwashing himself into the "saviour" narrative as a kid, and it turns out he's returned to the care of a sinister military doctor who medicates soldiers into more effective killers. The pills in question are red, white and blue. Simpson, who likes fire, prefers red.

The red pill - while hinting that Simpson might become Nuke in the Marvel universe - seems in this context to function also as an obvious reference to " red pillers", men's rights activists who see themselves as proud anti-feminists interested in dominance, traditional gender roles, and the subjugation of women, whose flaws make that subjugation necessary. It's also a reference to The Matrix, where those who disconnect themselves from the matrix choose the "real world" and make the difficult choices the real world demands.

Unfortunately, Simpson's red pill doesn't live it up to the red pill promise: his dose of "reality" renders him not just dangerously delusional, but so utterly at odds with nature and reality of any kind that he will forget to breathe unless he counteracts the pill's effects.

(This sly critique of geek culture takes on some other resonances: the red pill joins Carrie-Anne Moss in calling to mind The Matrix, just as David Tennant's Kilgrave can't help but evoke Doctor Who. Kilgrave is an evil version of the Doctor - a man who enjoys his power and doesn't mind using it to surround himself with beautiful worshipful female sidekicks.)

But the point of these echoes between Kilgrave and "regular" men is that they continually erode Kilgrave's exceptionalism. Heroin addiction is so common that it hardly seems fair to give Kilgrave credit for arranging Malcolm's. Nor did Simpson really need to be "Kilgraved" to give up his consent: he'd done it before quite willingly, and now he's every bit as addicted to the red pill as Malcolm was addicted to heroin. Simpson remains hooked on sex-specific heroism, and he produces it by, once again, creating the fire he wants credit for putting out - or endangering the safety he wants credit for maintaining. If he torched Barbie's Dream House as a kid, Kilgrave imitates the gesture by reconstructing Jones' childhood home. Jones's label for this reconstruction dovetails well with Simpson's story:

Photograph: Netflix

But if Jessica Jones is a feminist text, it's extraordinarily sympathetic to men who succumb to the temptation of power. Trish, for instance, does what many women dream of doing: she takes the red pill of male privilege and goes temporarily insane from the crack-like unreality it offers - power unfettered by morality or kindness or reflection. "Is this what it's like for you?" she says to Jones.

It isn't, of course. But it is what it's like for many men who farm out their consent to the police, the army, or Isis - famous for drugging recruits with "captagon", the real-world equivalent of the red pill. The real villain in Jessica Jonesis any idea of heroism that simplifies the "moral math".

Regardless of whether the delusion is that an artificial sense of plenty (the five-star hotels) or an artificial sense of safety (the protector) will produce the necessary unpayable love-debt, the red pill position is that love and life are about dominance, and one gets what one wants through guilt and gaslighting and a version of "free market" choice that is actually pure constraint.

Fortunately, there are other characters, like Trish and Malcolm and Luke - who, thank sweet Christmas - offers exactly only command, even when he's Kilgraved, and it's a call to self-determination at any price.

Photograph: Netflix

This article was amended on 27 November 2015, to clarify a reference to 'red pills'

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Jessica Jones: shattering exploration of rape, addiction and control

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Netflix's Jessica Jones is one of the most complex treatments of agency in the wake of victimhood that the small screen has seen yet seen. A grim show, shadowy and hopeless and unlikeable, it's finally less about trauma than it is a murky contest between revenge and rehabilitation and the term that floats between those: responsibility.

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Série Pacifico, 1987

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Série Retratos de Ciudad, 1994

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Série Galladas, 1970

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Who? Fernell Franco is one of Latin American photography's most prolific pioneers. Yet, he remains relatively unknown in Europe, with the first extensive European retrospective of his work opening at the Fondation Cartier in Paris later this week. Born in 1946, in the small hillside town of Versalles, as a small boy Franco and his family were forced to relocate to the city of Cali in southwestern Colombia, along with thousands of others fleeing the bipartisan violence that raged throughout the country at that time. This dramatic change of scenery made a lasting impact on Franco, who once observed, "In the countryside at night, there is the spectacle of stars in the sky. What I saw in contrast when I arrived in Cali were that the stars were on earth."

Franco found his way into photography at the age of 15, when he was employed as bike courier for a Cali-based photographic studio. A keen flaneur, he soon expressed an interest in getting behind the lens himself and was promoted to the role of fotocinero, enlisted to photograph everyday street scenes around the city. He was a natural, his unique exploration of light and shade and his gift for capturing the magic of the mundane setting him apart from his contemporaries, and by 1962 he had been hired as a photojournalist for El País and Diario Occidente.

What? Later Franco would go on to work as a fashion and advertising photographer but in spite of this influx of commercial work, it was always through photojournalism that the photographer found the greatest freedom of expression. "I was searching for common things," he said, "things that took place in the city on a daily basis, that happened in the lives of normal people." Of course, in what was a period of intense industrial modernisation in Colombia, the scope of everyday experience varied greatly - from the violence, drugs and prostitution that permeated the city's dark underbelly through to the sparkling cocktail parties of the upper echelons; and Franco wanted to document it all.

He was not alone in his fascination with urban themes; in the 1970s, Cali's art scene was positively blossoming and the photographer soon fell in with a group of similarly minded creatives, including writer Andrés Caicedo, filmmakers Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo and artist Oscar Muñoz, all united by their interest in popular culture. Muñoz - who has created a specially commissioned tribute to Franco for the Fondation Cartier's exhibit - explains, "I shared with Fernell Franco, and also with Ever Astudillo, a passion for the city at that time. The three of us used black and white, light and shadow, in a highly realistic figurative style, each one with his own poetic tone. We were fascinated by interiors and boarding houses, and later by the city in decline, its ruins, violence, and collapse."

Indeed, many of Franco's most arresting works offer views of majestically crumbling interiors and streets littered with people and detritus, always rendered with striking levels of chiaroscuro influenced by the photographer's love of Italian Neorealism and film noir. Cinema also inspired Franco to create a sense of narrative in his pictures, which he often achieved through experimental formatting. This is perhaps most apparent in his series Prostitutes (1970-72) where for one work he arranged four images of different girls, stretched suggestively over the same floral mattress, into a single montage; while in another he hand-tore copies of the same portrait, processed to varying degrees, and pasted them together to create a haunting composition that finishes with the woman's white face floating against a totally black background. This unusual approach to development was also typical of Franco's idiosyncratic practice - as curator María Wills Londoño explains, he frequently sought to "revert the traditional processes of the image by eschewing chemical fixing agents, allowing his photos to remain 'alive', [and] manipulated lighting effects in the darkroom."

Why? While Franco (who died in 2006) was certainly a key documentarian of Colombia's history, his works offering extraordinary insight into the zeitgeist of an age that saw huge political, cultural, and structural changes, it was his progressive approach to his chosen medium that truly broke the mould. And it is this that the Fondation Cartier's exhibition seeks to highlight and explore through its display of 140 of the photographer's remarkably original and atmospheric images. As Wills Londoño summarises, "Franco's highly experimental, pioneering work crossed the limits between media at a crucial moment in the history of photography, transcending the paradigm of photography as a documentary element and the photographer as merely a documentary agent."
Fernell Franco: Cali Clair-Obscur is at Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain from February 6 - June 5, 2016.

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How Fernell Franco Fused Film Noir with Photography

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Who? Fernell Franco is one of Latin American photography's most prolific pioneers. Yet, he remains relatively unknown in Europe, with the first extensive European retrospective of his work opening at the Fondation Cartier in Paris later this week.

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Telltale Games proves it can do more than just 'The Walking Dead'

The Walking Dead video game was a remarkable series, one that turned a zombie apocalypse into a never-ending stream of gut-punching moral dilemmas. It was also proof that developer Telltale games hadn't been wasting its time. The studio spent nearly a decade perfecting a formula that turned video games into a series of episodes, just like TV, each of which you could play in a single sitting once a month. But it wasn't until The Walking Dead that Telltale finally had a hit. " The Walking Dead was one of those overnight wonders that took 10 years to put together," explains studio president and founder Kevin Bruner. The question was whether the studio could do it again, and its first attempt is The Wolf Among Us.

The two series are similar in a lot of ways. Not only is The Wolf Among Us also based on a comic book ( Fables, in this case), it also features nearly identical gameplay and the same exact structure: a five-episode season that kicked off in October and wrapped up earlier this month. But in place of a ruined world filled with hungry undead, The Wolf Among Us is a gritty crime drama that drops fairy tale characters in the middle of New York City.

"We set really high standards for ourselves coming off the heels of The Walking Dead season one," explains Bruner. "We really wanted to prove that we could do it again." The first season of The Wolf Among Us proves just that.

Fables is a sprawling series of comics filled with centuries of lore and backstory, and The Wolf Among Us serves as a prequel of sorts. It's set in the 1980s, years before the first issue of the comics, and follows just a handful of the more important characters. (There's an in-game encyclopedia that provides more backstory on characters and locations, and a third of all players read each and every entry.)

The game puts you in the role of Bigby Wolf, the sheriff tasked with keeping order in Fabletown, an urban refuge where fairy tale creatures hide in plain sight using magic spells called glamours. Throwing a bunch of century-old, magic-wielding characters into modern life creates quite a bit of drama: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum have become gangsters, Beauty and the Beast are having marriage troubles, and one of the flying monkeys from Oz has turned into a drunk. At the center of all of this turmoil is Bigby, who was once the scourge of the fairy tale world as the Big Bad Wolf, but now spends his time keeping Fabletown in order.

Then a severed head shows up on his doorstep.

This sets up what turns out to be a big, complicated story with lots of moving parts, though you don't really have any influence over how things play out. Despite being a detective story, there's very little detecting to do in The Wolf Among Us. Just like The Walking Dead, the game is largely an interactive narrative, with lots of dialogue to read through and some light action scenes to break up the pacing. Your influence over the game is largely felt through the choices you make, like whether you go investigate one potential lead at the expense of another, or if you use your fists to beat clues out of a criminal instead of talking it out. Bigby's main job isn't to figure out what exactly happened - the story is largely linear, and the main plot points unfold without your help. "Really, how you behave while that's happening is what you're in control of," says Bruner.

This setup works mainly because Bigby is such an intriguing character. As the Big Bad Wolf, Bigby has a certain rage that always seems to be just beneath the surface - when things get really bad you can see it physically, as he transforms into an actual wolf. And the game gives you plenty of opportunities to explore this dark side. In fact, in many instances it feels like you're not-so-subtly being pushed to do something terrible. In one early episode, I made Bigby actually tear someone's arm off after a heated bar fight - which involved a disturbingly long sequence of button presses - and every time I saw that character later on his stump was a painful reminder of what I did. There's no question that by the end of the game you'll save Fabletown. But can you do it without making everyone despise you? (Of course, there's always the option to replay the episodes and see how things could have played out.)

The Wolf Among Us' biggest accomplishment is that you really get a sense of what it's like to be Bigby, as cliché as his "detective with a dark past" set-up may seem. There are plenty of moments where a specific action will probably help you solve the crime, but ultimately make Fabletown residents hate you. That includes everything from interrupting a funeral to pushing a young boy for information even though he's terrified.

These bad choices also tend to be the more exciting options, further enticing you to be bad. "When he lets the wolf out, it gets a little more out of control than he'd like," Bruner says of Bigby. "It's going to feel good in the moment and be really cool, but it might have some longer-lasting effects that you'll have to deal with." The choices aren't as horrible as in The Walking Dead, where you're often choosing who lives and dies, but they're just as impactful.

This is especially important because, really, he's the key to the whole game. There is a great supporting cast - including Bigby's much more restrained boss and partner Snow White, and the ever-suspicious mayor Ichabod Crane - but the experience lives and dies with Bigby. This is illustrated perfectly in the final episode, when you get to see Bigby's true form in a surprisingly tense and satisfying fight sequence with Bloody Mary. It feels like the season's climax. When you do finally bring the main villain to justice afterwards, it feels anticlimactic in comparison - Bigby's personal story is much more interesting than the core mystery.

Whether or not The Wolf Among Us lives up to the lofty standards of The Walking Dead is a matter of taste. The tone is much lighter, and a refreshing change from the grim zombie-filled apocalypse. But despite the differences in style, the two series share the same fundamentals: great characters, difficult and often shocking choices, and true-to-life writing. These may be games about zombies and fairy tales, but the characters feel more real than many more traditional dramas. And as Telltale uses the success of The Walking Dead to mold itself into a sort of premium cable channel for games, with a lineup that will soon include Game of Thrones.

Thankfully it knows how to do more than just zombies.

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'The Wolf Among Us' season one review: a terrifying fairy tale

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Telltale Games proves it can do more than just 'The Walking Dead' The Walking Dead video game was a remarkable series, one that turned a zombie apocalypse into a never-ending stream of gut-punching moral dilemmas. It was also proof that developer Telltale games hadn't been wasting its time.

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Film Noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics (first by Nino Frank in 1946) who noticed the trend of how 'dark', downbeat and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France to theatres following the war.

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Film noir was also derived from thecrime/gangster and detective/mystery sagas from the 1930s (i.e., Little Caesar (1930) , Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) ), but very different in tone and characterization. Notable film noirgangster films, such as They Drive By Night (1940), Key Largo (1948) and White Heat (1949) each featured noir elements within the traditional gangster framework.

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Film noirs have recently been released in the modern era and have been refashioned for present-day sensibilities. A number of them in the 60s-70s were hard-boiled policeman-hero films that contained film noir-ish characteristics. Most neo-noirs attempted to re-establish the moods and themes of classic noirs.

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Badlands (1973) , similar in plot to earlier "amour fou" (doomed lovers-on-the-run) noir films, was inspired and based on the murder spree of a killing, loving couple, Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, in the late 1950's in Nebraska and bordering states; social outcast and misfit, James Dean look-alike ex-garbage

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Not Specifically A Genre, More Like A Style.

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Not Specifically A Genre, More Like A Style.

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Finally, Schrader says that the fourth element was the hard-boiled tradition. Writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain wrote many books that were eventually turned into film noir. What these authors and films have in common is a cynical and bleak outlook with a tough main character.

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"It was a dark and stormy night. I had a date with destiny and her name was Trouble. I got in my car and headed for the station. I was there to meet a dame - the kind of dame that takes a man's heart and breaks it like a toy. The kind of dame that makes you come back so she can break it again and you feel something for a change. It doesn't matter that it burns your insides up worse than cheap Scotch.
She loomed through the fog like a dream that becomes a man's worst nightmare. I was waiting for her. Little did I know she'd brought two friends with her - friends by the name of Smith and Wesson..."

Ok, ok ok...enough of me waxing dime novel lyrical. I'll stick to photography, shall I? Ah, but last night's Creative Photo Workshop Film Noir event was wonderful, even if I say so myself. Glynn and I were on our game last night, and our models Taisen Blackwolf and Natasha Humble could not have been better chosen for their roles. Donned in the getup of the 40's film noir movies and lit by two continuous FotoBestway heads, they looked the part in the mist generated by our recently acquired fog machine.
The first order of the day was to instruct everyone to set their jpegs in the camera to monochrome. If they were going to shoot in RAW as well, they would have a colour image to boot. But learning to shoot and see in black and white was a serious part of what Glynn and I wanted to convey last night. It is a wonderful and eye-opening thing to learn.

As our customers also learned, Film Noir is one of those photo genres where what you don't light is more important than what you do. Its about creating mystery with darkness, and allowing the imagination to wander therein. For photographers, its about metering for the highlights and using the camera in manual mode. For our customers it was about learning, and enjoyment - the two essential parts of every workshop we run.

Abbottsford Convent was the perfect venue for this shoot because of it arches, collonades and textures. Its classic staircase also made an accurate setting for our opening setup, and after that we did not need to wander far to create a diversity of Film Noir images. We use the Abbottsford Convent for the majority of our Melbourne events, but last night it came into its own.

I have to say that I enjoyed last night's event very much. I always enjoy running our events, but some more than others, I have to say. Last night was one of those. It was very satisfying. I am pleased that our customers went home with images straight out of their cameras, images that didn't need PhotoShop or Lightroom to make them happen. That should be the way of it as often as possible. Composing and metering in camera to create an image to the degree possible while on location is at the heart of the satisfied photographer. There is something about looking at a complete image on the back of your camera and realising that you have created a masterpiece, right there, right then. At the very heart of all we teach lies that very principle. We hope you can come along sometime to see how possible it is, and how very satisfying.

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"It was a dark and stormy night. I had a date with destiny and her name was Trouble. I got in my car and headed for the station. I was there to meet a dame - the kind of dame that takes a man's heart and breaks it like a toy.