ROMEO IS BLEEDING (1993) Quentin Tarantino meets Raymond Chandler

In '40s noir flicks, you don't often see blood, both because they were shot in black and white and because of Code restrictions. But in the colorful neo-noir ROMEO IS BLEEDING, you get lots of the red stuff. You also get lots of Chandler-esque twists as in, say, THE BIG SLEEP (1946), with Bogart playing private eye Philip Marlowe. In ROMEO, Jack Gramaldi (Gary Oldman) is no straight-up dick; he's a corrupt cop who splits his time between guarding state witnesses and ratting out their secret whereabouts to the Mob on their secret whereabouts, while building a sizable nestegg and keeping his double life hidden from his wife and teenage mistress. It all begins to unravel when Jack is blackmailed to displatch Mona Demarkov (Lena Olin), a statuesque female Russian assassin who oozes sex, danger, and more than her share of testoserone. Trouble is, he can’t decide whether to kill her ... or drill her. Oldman and Olin are terrific in their roles, and it's dandy fun watching a bad cop you can't help but like trying to survive (though we know from scene one that he will).