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Director Carl Franklin followed the success of 1992’s break-out thriller One False Move with his most notable work to date, Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), a Los Angeles neo noir recuperating post-war racial tensions within the confines of the divisive city, filtered through a glop of familiar genre motifs and superb command of tone and mood. Starring Denzel Washington and based on a novel by Walter Mosley, the box office failings of the film curbed additional adaptations of the author’s work featuring reluctant private eye Easy Rawlins. Twenty years after its premiere, the film has maintained an unprecedented level of critical acclaim assisting its sterling reputation. As far as noir goes, we’ve seen this sort of narrative before, a beautiful woman with particularly damning information and labyrinthine connections involved in a dangerous mixture of sex and politics, but never from the perspective of a black private eye in a viciously segregated America.