Article: Shades of gray; Film noir archetypes populate `Sin City'

Film noir gets an explicit update in "Sin City," starring Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba.

"Sin City" opens with a murder and closes with a suicide. Things get really nasty in between. The first movie of 2005 that made me snap to attention, "Sin City" turns Frank Miller's extremely graphic graphic novels, first launched in 1992, into a grisly, galvanizing update of film noir fatalism. What happens in "Sin City" feels like what might have been going on in those 1940s and '50s crime pictures when no one was looking.

The people of "Sin City" certainly are the types you would normally turn

away from -- shady cops, cruel murderers, vengeful prostitutes. The movie

consists of a series of ...

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