I'm attempting to answer question one. By way of accessing another article and attempting to summarize it, by which I believe I might compose a description of the content therein, for The Neo-Noir 90s article.

Mark Conrad references that "...we should all be able to recognize a classic film noir by now when we see one, what with its shadowy lighting, and tilted camera shots. That the classic film noir's will utilize any number of themes that make it a noir; such as bad guys as heroes, and good guys doing bad awful things." A sample of a noir classic is in James M. Cain's, "The Postman Always Rings Twice" (1946), where the antihero drifter gets himself hired on at a small cafe-diner, only to begin a courtship and affair with the owners wife, who lures him into killing her husband, which ultimately leads to our antiheroes conviction and death penalty sentence, which ends with his demise. 

Neo-Noir: "Conrad states that the term neo-noir describes any film coming after the classic film noir period from the 1940s-1958. That these later films usually are not shot in black-n-white film, and likely do not contain any crazy lighting, shadowing effects, or angled camera shots of the classic noir films, and most if not all are filmed in Technicolor. Tidbit of added information:Conrad continues, that as well, in neo-noir films of today because of the abandonment of government censorship, and what with the introduction on the new ratings codes, how neo-noir film makers get away with a lot more than did their film noir predecessor's in their own time period. Conrad further explains that for example, under the old censorship rules, no crime was expected to go unpunished...but, how rather that under the new ratings codes, in neo-noir films of today, crimes and criminals can and do go expectantly unpunished, often even in vigilantism scenes." 
(Mark Conrad. "The Philosophy Of Neo-Noir." EBSCOhost. WEB. 24 Aug. 2013).