L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise
September 10-November 12, 2025
Presented by Greg Olson Productions
This series honors my Los Angeles friends, all those who suffered recently, and those who still live the California Dream.
Alluring women and men, easy money schemes, fast cars, lethal weapons, treachery. You can cook the noir recipe anywhere that desire burns and conscience is spurned. Here it’s the City of Angels, soft warm air like a caress, jasmine-scented. Palm trees, architectural wonders, a multicultural fiesta, sunsets to worship, beach life to the beat of surging creativity in film, music, art, literature. But the lush sweet life landscape can tremble with quakes, and ignite in the hot desert winds. The shadows of human darkness, wild lust, lies, greed and corruption can threaten the sun. Los Angeles can be the American Dream in widescreen and Technicolor, but author Bret Easton Ellis sees that it’s also “a noir utopia, like a tropical Berlin of the 1930s.” Temperature’s rising, existential heat’s high, but L.A. Noir keeps its cool.
Individual Tickets: $15
Passes: $106 | $91 SIFF SAM, Swedish Club, UW Cinema Studies, NWFF, SFI, TheFilmSchool, Festa Italiana, Alliance Francaise de Seattle, Scarecrow Video, & KING FM members
Pass provides access to all L.A. Noir: Shadows in Paradise screenings, September 10-November 12 at SIFF Cinema Uptown.
SIFF year-round passes and vouchers are not valid for this screening.
L.A. Noir: Kiss Me Deadly
USA | 1955 | 106 min. | Robert Aldrich
September 10, 2025
Pulp novelist Mickey Spillane’s swaggering private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) likes his dames and drinks, and cruising through life with the top down. He could do it half asleep, but one night he stops for a battered woman walking on a deserted highway--and wakes up to a web of dark forces that could snuff out the world. Kiss Me Deadly is a riff of noir jazz blowing hot, surreal, mysterious, scary. Hammer doesn’t even know who he’s fighting. But he can feel a chill, the cold heart of evil. And we feel full blast cinematic power: “Pretty pow!”
L.A. Noir: Point Blank
1967 | 92 min. | John Boorman
September 17, 2025
There’s a scent of metaphysical mystery in the sultry air. A master thief (Lee Marvin) is shot by his partner (John Vernon), who takes off with “their” $93,000 and Marvin’s wife (Sharon Aker), and heads for L.A. Marvin survives, pursues them, his hard leather shoes clacking and echoing in the LAX airport hallway. His name is Walker, and like a hungry ghost or avenging angel, so cool he could frost palm trees, he strides forward unstoppable. Walker embraces a helpful woman (Angie Dickinson), and makes powerful men wish they’d never heard of him.
L.A. Noir: The Long Goodbye
USA | 1973 | 112 min. | Robert Altman
September 24, 2025
Master noir novelist Raymond Chandler’s 1953 "The Long Goodbye" was taut and hard-boiled. Altman’s film version is charmingly meandering and woozy. Elliott Gould’s bedraggled, bumbling Philip Marlowe is the anti-Bogart version of the character. Buffeted by a whirlwind of chaotic corruption, Gould responds with his go-with-the-flow mantra, “It's okay with me.” But his shambling form hides a classic Marlowe integrity that will spark into action. Cinematic master Altman layers his widescreen frames with glass surfaces that reflect, obscure, and reveal shifting realities.
L.A. Noir: Cutter’s Way (35mm)
1981 | 105 min. | Ivan Passer
October 1, 2025
One of the 1980s’ great films is warm with friendship, chilled with suspicion. One night beach boy Jeff Bridges thinks he may have seen an oil tycoon (Stephen Elliott) dispose of a teenage girl’s body in a misty alley. He tells his disabled war veteran friend John Heard about it, and Heard, angry about his own shortcomings and “the sins of the world,” plans to sleuth around and expose Elliott. Facts are veiled in uncertainty, but Heard, despite the warnings of Bridges and Heard’s wife Lisa Eichorn, won’t be deterred. As suspense spirals, should Bridges go with his gut or do a leap of faith? Presented on 35mm.
L.A. Noir: The Two Jakes
1990 | 138 min. | Jack Nicholson
October 8, 2025
At the end of Chinatown (1978), private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) was a shattered man, his love Evelyn Mulwray shot dead, her daughter Catherine abducted by her monstrous grandfather. In The Two Jakes (like Chinatown, written by Robert Towne), it’s ten years later in 1940s L.A., and Gittes is back on his feet, but haunted by the past, his inability to help those he loved. This time SoCal corruption centers on the black gold of oil fields, and the houses built on them. There’s another Jake (Harvey Keitel, a jittery-sexy widow (Madeleine Stowe), a murder, and an alluring embodiment of days gone by.
L.A. Noir: Heat (30th Anniversary)
1995 | 170 min. | Michael Mann
October 15, 2025
A criminal (Robert De Niro), a cop (Al Pacino). Ice and fire, coming to a boil. De Niro and his pals (Val Kilmer, Jon Voight) pull off big robberies with military precision. Steamed-up Pacino uses intuition and manpower to track them, with little success. Stylish director Mann (TV’s Miami Vice) pauses his onrushing crime saga so De Niro and Pacino can appear together and have coffee. The outlaw and the lawman are born to do what they do, and they’re not stopping, but they share words about the fullness and emptiness of their lives, what they win and lose.
L.A. Noir: L.A. Confidential (35mm)
1997 | 138 min. | Curtis Hanson
October 22, 2025
Guided by James Ellroy’s fierce novel, director Hanson wonders why honorable men, sworn to uphold the law, tip towards the dark side. Passions and secrets drive a 1950s LAPD neophyte (Guy Pearce), a tough cop (Russell Crowe), and a showboat (Kevin Spacey) allied with gangsters, Hollywood, and sleazy tabloids. The top cop (James Cameron) pulls strings, and fragments of meaning coalesce into story. The men’s jobs are their lives, but love can’t be denied. For Pearce and Crowe, it’s centered on a classy prostitute (Kim Basinger), who holds a key to the city. Presented on 35mm.
L.A. Noir: The Limey
1999 | 89 min. | Steven Soderbergh
October 29, 2025
This lean quest film hums with counterculture vibes. An aging ex-con (Swinging London icon Terence Stamp) flies to L.A. when his daughter (Melissa George) dies in a car crash. Her death was suspicious, and the road leads to a music mogul (Hip icon Peter Fonda), George’s last boyfriend. Fonda’s surrounded by protectors (Barry Newman of the 1970s cult film Vanishing Point), but Stamp gets help from his daughter’s friends (Cool Girl Lesley Anne Warren, Luis Guzman). Can Stamp’s consciousness expand beyond his need for cold revenge?
L.A. Noir: Drive
USA | 2011 | 100 min. | Nicolas Winding Refn
November 5, 2025
Self-contained, in control, Driver (Ryan Gosling) is super professional as both Hollywood stunt driver and getaway transportation for criminals. When he shares an elevator ride with a sweet woman (Carey Mulligan) there’s only a shy glance between them, but a hum of connection persists, even after her husband (Oscar Issac) comes home from prison. Gosling’s like a romantic troubadour, pledged to his lady in spirit. There are good guys (Bryan Cranston) and bad (Albert Brooks), but Gosling will drive Mulligan in the golden afternoon and through the night, have no fear.
L.A. Noir: Inherent Vice
USA | 2014 | 148 min. | Paul Thomas Anderson
November 12, 2025
Smoking a joint helps beach town private eye Doc Sportello (a transcendent Jaoquin Phoenix) see all the dimensions of a case. HIs former girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston) shows up, then vanishes in the night. Her mysteries multiply as he encounters the sinister Golden Fang organization, a presumed-dead sax player (Owen Wilson), and Doc’s nemesis-friend Bigfoot (James Brolin). The brilliant, satirical universe of Thomas Pynchon’s source novel is on beguiling display, as beauty, menace, absurdity, heart and soul mix it up every minute. Doc rides his counterculture values, and Neil Young’s music, like a sweet wave. With Martin Short, Reese Witherspoon.