Sin City is the answer to that childhood riddle, "What's black and white and read all over?" In this case, it's not "read" but "red," as in blood, which Sin City tosses around by the gallons. The film is, in a word, gorgeous. It's a stylish, lovingly rendered, visually arresting trip through a hyper-violent noir underworld. Sin City is so hardboiled and bad-ass that when you leave the theater, you'll feel beat up and dazed, like you've been worked over by some of Sin City's locals.

An adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel series of the same name, Sin City follows the interlocked stories of three of Basin City's toughest tough guys. The first and fourth stories of the movie focus on Hartigan (Bruce Willis), an honest cop with one day left on the job. Before he retires, he's got one last case to wrap up-the kidnapping of 11-year-old Nancy Callahan by Junior (Nick Stahl), the psychotic son of Senator Roark. Hartigan saves the girl but is betrayed by his partner (Michael Madsen); he's then framed for murder, rape and other sundry atrocities and stuck in jail for eight years. From there, we move onto Marv (Mickey Rourke), a hulking, psychotic brute with a face carved from cinder block. Marv, too, has been framed for murder, accused of killing Goldie (Jamie King), a high-class hooker who showed Marv the only kindness he's ever known. Marv's quest for vengeance takes him out of the city to an isolated farmhouse where he finds the real killer and discovers the underpinnings of a much larger conspiracy. And finally, there's Dwight (Clive Owen), who, in his haste to protect the Amazonian hookers of the city's Old Town neighborhood, ends up shattering the fragile truce between the cops, the mob and the women.

Sin City is the most faithful film adaptation of a comic book ever made. Miller and Robert Rodriguez co-directed the film (a first in movie history, actually, which forced Rodriguez to resign from the Directors Guild because it wouldn't allow the two to share a directing credit), lifting panels directly out of Miller's comics and putting them on the screen. Miller's distinctive style-high-contrast black and white images, all hard angles and silhouettes, curvaceous women in fetish gear and mesmerizing ultra-violence-is a perfect match for film. As for the cast, well, they're almost perfect, too, though Rourke is clearly the star of the show as Marv, a noir-superman who doesn't hurt girls but has no problem dismembering a creep and feeding him to a wolf-dog.

As in the comics, Rodriguez and Miller accentuate only a handful of colors in the film. A character's eyes will hold a flash of green for a moment, Dwight's old-school Converse high-tops are bright red, and when Hartigan's nemesis, Junior, returns, he's rendered in a sickly day-glo yellow. Blood is white, except when things get extremely gory, in which case it's bright, bright red. And does the gore fly! Sin City is so over-the-top violent that you may, for a brief instant, feel guilty for enjoying yourself as necks break and limbs are chopped off willy-nilly, but that guilt is quickly replaced with appreciation for the breathtaking imagery. The result is an artistic vision worth drowning in.