Sin City

A film set in one city, joining three separate stories. The city is called Basin City. The police have been bought, the church is involved, and one family runs the place. In the first story Marv wakes one night and the woman beside him is dead. He tears the city apart to find who did it. In the second, Dwight helps a friend and the situation grows when a policeman is killed by accident; one district is run by women with their own guns, and the arrangement is about to break. In the third, an old policeman saves a girl from a killer and pays for it with eight years in prison. The three stories intersect and the chronology is deliberately shuffled. What the narrative is interested in is not events but form: the film carries the panels of a comic straight to the screen and makes no claim to realism. The image is black and white with individual objects left in colour; a dress, a car, eyes and blood. Almost all of it was shot in front of green screen. The actors worked without seeing each other and the entire city was made afterwards. The writer of the comic directed it as co-director. For that the director had to leave his union, because the rules did not allow a shared credit. One scene was directed by another filmmaker as a guest, for a token fee. Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Benicio del Toro, Elijah Wood and Rosario Dawson are in the cast. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes extreme stylisation and the language of noir. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take the violence; the film uses mutilation and torture as elements of style.