Movie fans who are tired of superhero epics or kids’ movies often call for more adult fare at the cineplex. Yet I’m not sure audiences could handle the realism for which they seem to pine.

I’m a regular moviegoer, and one of my favorite places to see a film is at the AFI Silver Theater in Maryland. AFI stands for American Film Institute, and the AFI Theater in Silver Spring, just outside of D.C., is bliss for cinephiles.

They will screen the latest Spike Lee, Wes Anderson, or Quentin Tarantino project—and in 70 millimeter—and they also specialize in cool film festivals. They showcase films from Africa, Iran, Ireland, and the Caribbean. They also have older films that fit into a theme—Vista Vision movies, sexy pre-code movies, Star Wars weeks, and my personal favorite, Noir City D.C., the annual Film Noir Festival.

The thing I love about Noir City D.C. and film noir in general is not just the rich cinematography and sharp writing, but the realism. In most modern movies women are treated as “girl bosses,” characters like Rey in Star Wars who have tremendous power yet who are incapable of sin or deceit. In film noir, however, the bad guys are often women—just as in real life.

Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past, Gilda Mundson in Gilda, Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. The 1950 noir Gun Crazy was originally titled Deadly is the Femme Fatale. These women are sexy, conniving, sarcastic, and often downright evil.

Gun Crazy is great example of this. A man named Barton “Bart” Tare (John Dall) has been obsessed with guns since he was a young boy. It has sometimes gotten him into trouble, but then he joins the army and channels his passion into a positive direction. After coming home from war, he has a chance to live a quiet, productive life doing promotions for the Remington gun company. There’s only one thing standing in his way—a woman.

Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) is a carnival performer who specializes in sharpshooting. The two have a natural attraction, but Laurie Starr has no interest in a normal life with a regular guy who makes normal wages. She wants expensive things. In a way that’s unimaginable in today’s Hollywood, Laurie is depicted as reckless, greedy, and dangerous. As in many examples of film noir, the female lead is a femme fatale and the undoing of the male protagonist. This character type is also featured in films like Black Widow, Accused of Murder, A Kiss Before Dying, and Party Girl.

In his great 1961 novel The Moviegoer, Walker Percy describes a man named Jack “Binx” Bolling who has no joy in life other than driving his sports car, dating women, and escaping into movies. Bolling has been viewed as a modern existentially tormented being who suffers despair, and for whom movies offer a bright diversion. As the writer Paul Elie put it,

Bolling has been seen as a representative man and his outlook as a symptom of the sickness of American society. Some commentators, finding bits of Percy’s philosophy in Bolling’s mouth, see him as a spokesman for the author; others see him as a philosopher in his own right, an existentialist in a seersucker suit and snap-brim hat. Yet the epigraph—“the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair”—actually points the reader away from philosophy. For all his philosophizing, Bolling is finally unaware of what ails him, unable to name his despair as despair. He is a representative man, yes; but what he says is less important than what he fails to say.

Yet unlike Bolling, I and other moviegoers often know exactly what ails us—the duplicity and bad moral character of too many men and women—and so we enjoy having it portrayed accurately on the silver screen. Movies are indeed an escape into a different world, but they can also be a way of fearlessly depicting the reality of the real world. This was often the case with the cinema of the 1970s, but I often find the film noir movies of postwar America to be even more realistic.

Gritty 1970s movies like Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon wallow in a world that is bleak and without glamour. A great noir flick like Gilda or Laura has dark shadows and violence, but also sexiness, lush wardrobes, and gorgeous people. Gilda is much more realistic than Taxi Driver, which shows the world as a dystopia filled with degenerates and mutants. The world has junkies and crooks but it also produces the likes of a Rita Hayworth.

I started attending the AFI noir festival in 2018, and every year I’m impressed by the quality of the films and the way they refuse to shy away from reality. Yes, I’m entering there a fantasy world that is in many ways different from the life I’m living. Yet these films are also a way of pronouncing the truth in a way that woke modern culture does not like to face—namely, how women can be just as evil as men.

In the past few years, the reality of my own life included things like surviving a nasty political hit, the death of my mother and my brother, and a broken relationship with people I love. There have been betrayals from supposed allies, women who acted Satanic, and journalists pretending to be innocent interlocutors who in reality were seeking to destroy me. Movies like This Gun for Hire, He Walked by Night, The Accused and The Third Man dramatized things from real life like pain, suffering, and facing difficulties and death better than any shiny Marvel fantasy or even multi-episode streaming drama, which tends to avoid killing off main characters.

Film noir is unpredictable. At the end of Gun Crazy, for example, the male protagonist shoots and kills his girlfriend, who was about to shoot a police man, who then shoots and kills the man. Turn on the news you’ll find something similar.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say you don’t find realism in many American movies these days. This year I attended the Capital Irish Film Festival at the AFI, and it was remarkable how adult the films were compared to American movies. A documentary about writer Edna O’Brien revealed a complex woman who was an accomplished writer and escaped an abusive marriage yet rejected the feminist label. The film Kathleen is Here explored the deep need girls have for a mother. Blue Fiddle depicted a bond between generations of Irish musicians and was not afraid to kill off a main character.

These movies entertain, but they also teach you ways to deal with real life. I remember coming home to a call from a reporter after attending a movie at the Noir City D.C. Festival in 2018. I had been in the news for some political nonsense, and the journalists wanted to ask me some questions about it. I responded with a line from the 1957 classic The Sweet Smell of Success, starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. “I don’t like you,” I said, echoing Burt Lancaster. “You’re like a cookie filled with arsenic.”