Released 2005
Stars Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Clive Owen, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Jamie King, Brittany Murphy, Benicio Del Toro, Nick Stahl, Elijah Wood, Michael Clarke Duncan
Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller

If film noir was not a genre, but a hard man on mean streets with a lost lovely in his heart and a gat in his gut, his nightmares would look like "Sin City." The new movie by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller plays like a convention at the movie museum in Quentin Tarantino's subconscious. A-list action stars rub shoulders with snaky villains and sexy wenches, in a city where the streets are always wet, the cars are ragtops and everybody smokes. It's a black-and-white world, except for blood, which is red, eyes which are green, hair which is blond, and the Yellow Bastard.

This isn't an adaptation of a comic book, it's like a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids. It contains characters who occupy stories, but to describe the characters and summarize the stories would be like replacing the weather with a weather map.

The movie is not about narrative but about style. It internalizes the harsh world of the Frank Miller "Sin City" comic books and processes it through computer effects, grotesque makeup, lurid costumes and dialogue that chops at the language of noir. The actors are mined for the archetypes they contain; Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Benicio Del Toro, Clive Owen and the others are rotated into a hyperdimension. We get not so much their presence as their essence; the movie is not about what the characters say or what they do, but about who they are in our wildest dreams.

Summary by Roger Ebert

Boy, comic books have changed since I was a kid. Now they're called graphic novels and are filled with adult content, and now Robert Rodriguez has figured out how to translate them to the film medium. Stylistically this is one amazing film. It's like opening one of these books and watching the panels move. One of my favorite movie tricks is when a black and white image has an object that's in a different color, and this movie uses that trick perfectly. I haven't read any of Frank Miller's books, but I believe Miller deserves the credit there. As far as the content is concerned, it's a little gory and disturbing for my tastes, but I did enjoy it. I especially enjoyed Mickey Rourke as Marv. It's nice to see Rourke come out of his drunken stupor to play a dark campy role like this in a movie that people actually watched. --Bill Alward, September 11, 2005