New Rose Hotel

Director: Abel Ferrara

1998 / 93min / DCP

Based on a short story of the same title by William Gibson, Ferrara’s blearily lovelorn neo-noir stars Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe as “Fox” and “X,” a pair of experts in corporate cloak-and-dagger operations based in a sterile not-too-distant-future Tokyo who specialize in coercing R&D scientists into defection, the duo, after getting one look at Shinjuku chanteuse/call girl Sandii (Asia Argento), concluding she might make the perfect tool for coercion. A sultry, sleazy story of shifting allegiances, double-crosses, and mournful reminiscences that may in fact be misremembered, with Argento’s throaty nightclub crooning (“You know, I’d die for you / So don’t kill me, baby…”) suggesting a cyberpunk version of Rita Hayworth in Gilda.