If traditional film noir is a genre of mid-century black and white urban crime thrillers evoking an expressionist mood with its dark corners and back alleys, with its trench coats and shadows slanting through Venetian blinds in dusty offices where the scent of death hangs in a plume of coiling cigarette smoke and where mysterious women with golden hair and stiletto heels plead their case to a P.I. fighting inner demons, then film soleil is its modern or late-century reconfiguration, adapted to modern tastes and exploiting technical inovations, using as its most common setting dry sun-beaten highways that cut mercilessly through a parched, sagebrush-filled desert, its women in cowboy boots and jeans and the men deranged by their biological drives.

The string of late century sunlit crime films officially began in 1984 with the release of Blood Simple, and soon included Kill Me Again (1989), After Dark, My Sweet (1990), and One False Move (1992), heralding the arrival of a new cinematic style that, unlike traditional noir, sometimes celebrated evil, rewarded greed, and in general indicated significant moral shifts in the culture.