Dark and deadly, Sin City hits you right between the eyes with a striking blend of old school film noir and newfangled comicbook visuals.

Cinema's first literal adaptation of a comic book, this ferocious tale of thugs, prostitutes, murder and revenge is like nothing you've ever seen before.

Set in the fictional metropolis of Basin City and featuring a powerhouse cast including Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba and Clive Owen, Sin City intertwines three stories from Frank Miller's notorious novels.

There's The Hard Goodbye, in which thug Marv (Rourke) seeks revenge for the death of a prostitute; The Big Fat Kill which sees private eye Dwight (Owen) help a gang of warrior prostitutes; and That Yellow Bastard, the tale of a cop's (Willis) battle against a child-killer.

Director Robert Rodriguez rewrites all the rules with a movie that is shot almost entirely against a green screen, with the backgrounds added during post production, and reproduced in glossy monochrome with poignant splashes of colour.

Sticking close to the noirish comic book mood, this movie is packed with hard-boiled dialogue, and barely a moment passes in this ultra violent movie when someone isn't being killed in some innovative and ghoulish fashion. The men are tough-talking monosyllabic types with high thresholds for pain, and the women wear very little.

Rodriguez has certainly come a long way since his no-budget debut triumph of El Mariachi in 1992, the first in the acclaimed trilogy, and what he did for the western he has more than achieved in this modern noir.

"I was a big fan of noir, I almost re-made Kiss Me Deadly back in 1997... but I was afraid to be too nostalgic," explains Rodriguez.

What I liked about Frank's material was that although it is in that tradition of noir, it was so updated, so savage and new that it wouldn't feel like a nostalgia trip. That's why I was really excited about this."

There's a little of Pulp Fiction in Sin City, both in the hipness and the jolt it gives audiences, and that's no surprise seeing as Quentin Tarantino shot a scene in the movie.

Rodriguez recalls: "I told him last year, it took him a while to make Kill Bill which he thought was going to be a very fast shoot but I told him if he'd shot it on digital, it would have been much faster. So I said the next time I was shooting something on digital, he should come and direct a sequence.
"We shot the scene with Clive and Benicio in the rain, on the road in a car - and there was no rain, no road and no car. He got to see how all that stuff went away and he could concentrate on getting a great performance from the actors".

Sin City is a rich and scintellating homage to Miller's work - but is there more to come?

Rodriguez says: "I know we're going to do the second one, that's based on A Dame To Kill For which takes place before these stories. So that would probably be the most interesting one to help complete this story".