At RogerEbert.com, friend of the Gutter Jessica Ritchey writes about “cocaine noir.” “Between the winding down of the first neo-noir cycle popularized by New Hollywood titles like Chinatown and The Long Goodbye, and before the rise of the erotic thriller as a recognizable genre with entries like Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, there was an entire class of films that had their roots in neo-noir but considerably upped their levels of sex and violence. ‘Cocaine Noir’ might be the best descriptor for them. These films soaked up all the excesses of the eighties and threw them right back in the face of the cheerful Reaganism that was breaking the middle class and poor with the folksiest of smiles. It might have been morning in America, but it was permanently midnight in these films.”