As for the question of women in neo-noirs and whether the notable films should foreground "women in distress/women in peril" as opposed to women with agency or women with character flaws (which they do possess, just not nearly at the same frequency or level of toxic intensity as men), I think a look at the first three lists in the fourth pass demonstrates that they are well-represented in terms of all these character types.
Films with significant roles for women in terms of neo-noir can be found across all 50 years of coverage ...off the top of my head here:
1968 Pretty Poison*
1971 Klute
1973 Badlands*
1974 Chinatown
1974 Bring Me The Head of Alberto Garcia
1981 Body Heat
1987 Fatal Attraction
1989 Last Exit to Brooklyn*
1990 After Dark, My Sweet*
1990 The Grifters*
1994 The Last Seduction
1995 Leaving Las Vegas
1997 Jackie Brown
(1998 Out of Sight)
1997 Lost Highway
1998 A Simple Plan
2001 Mulholland Drive
2003 Monster
2004 Million Dollar Baby
2007 No Country For Old Men
2008 Frozen River
2010 Winter's Bone
2012 Gone
*Films added back to our lists thanks to Chi-Bob's list (thanks, Bob!)
(By placing it on this list in parentheses, I'm suggesting that OUT OF SIGHT belongs somewhere in the overall collection of films that has expanded from the first cut Top 25 into a list that covers somewhere between 100-125 titles at this point. I would agree with Mike that it's certainly not going to make the Top 25, and probably not the Top 50, but it's the best film of the ones mentioned by Dan in this thread, even if it is very likely "neo-noir lite.")
The question of whether there should be more women in distress/women in peril neo-noirs is, of course, a separate issue--as is the question as to why there don't seem to be a lot of high-quality films focused on that condition, particularly given the continued, unfortunate and unacceptable prevalence of sexual assault crimes against women. (I think we can agree that the reasons for the relative scarcity of such films have to do with structural cultural flaws in Hollywood that have only begun to be addressed during the #metoo movement.)
In any case, the primary reason for any perceived shortfall of such films is due to the producers of the films themselves, not those of us who are slogging through the neo-noir filmography of the past half-century. (I also think that we would find more such films in foreign neo-noir, where the Hollywood influence is seriously muted.)
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