A vengeful drifter tries to blackmail a fugitive war profiteer in Robert Montgomery’s curious 1947 film noir, which is less interested in plot than the small details of a small New Mexico border town. 

Writer-director-star Lawrence Michael Levine has crafted what initially appears to be another chatty New York art-indie, but it quickly develops into a smart, stylish, entertaining murder mystery. 

Who killed the woman in the secret sex apartment shared by five men? Could it be… everyone?

A 197-minute comedy from the director of Humanité and Twentynine Palms? It sounds unlikely and unappealing, but Bruno Dumont’s made-for-TV production is full of dark, funny, disturbing surprises. 

Before Inherent Vice, there was Robert Altman’s definitive SoCal noir, which adapts a Raymond Chandler novel into a shaggy private-eye picture that’s full of hazy atmosphere and irreverent attitude. 

Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 mystery novel sends pot-smoking P.I. Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) on a case that signals the changing Southern California culture of 1970.