Essential Films Noir
FilmsNoir.Net’s list of the 235 essential films noir. Titles with an asterisk have been reviewed on FilmsNoir.Net – full reviews here and capsule reviews here.
The list is in two parts:
- The 71 all-time great films noir – rated 5-stars
- The 164 runners-up – rated 4 or 4.5 stars
The list is not definitive. There are gaps. Missing are neo-noirs, a few French noirs, and directors such as Hitchcock. There are varied reasons but mostly the gaps are due to my personal preference, or because some films are not fresh enough in my mind and need to be watched again with their candidacy here in mind.
5 star Noirs |
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| *La Nuit du Carrefour | 1931 France | Aka ‘Night at the Crossroads’. Early Jean Renoir poetics. Magically delicious femme-noir and a brilliant car chase at night. Moody and bizarrre! |
| *You Only Live Once | 1937 US | Fritz Lang and Hollywood kick-start poetic realism! Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney are the doomed lovers on the run. |
| *Hotel du Nord | 1938 France | Poetic realist melodrama of lives at provincial French hotel. As moody as noir with a darkly absurd resolution. |
| *Port of Shadows | 1938 France | Aka Le Quai des brumes. Fate a dank existential fog ensnares doomed lovers Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan after one night of happiness. |
| *I Wake Up Screaming | 1941 US | Early crooked cop psycho-noir. Redolent noir motifs, dark shadows, off-kilter framing and expressionist imagery. |
| *The Maltese Falcon | 1941 US | Bogart as Sam Spade the quintessential noir protagonist. A loner on the edge of polite society, sorely tempted to transgress but declines and is neither saved nor redeemed. |
| *Ossessione | 1942 Italy | Demands and rewards multiple viewings. Visconti has taken a hard-boiled story and imbued it with intelligence, polemic, a humanist outrage, and above all, a deep compassion for the human predicament. |
| *Journey Into Fear | 1943 US | Moody Orson Welles’ noir. Exotic locales, sexy dames, weird villains, politics, wisdom, philosophy, and a wry humor. |
| *The Seventh Victim | 1943 US | “Despair behind, and death before doth cast”. The terror of an empty existence. Brilliant Lewton gothic melodrama. |
| *Christmas Holiday | 1944 US | Director Robert Siodmak smashes genre conventions by unleashing a wild expressionist ambience in a bizarre story of obsession and guilt thathas you appalled yet enthralled. Full of bizarre surprises. |
| *Double Indemnity | 1944 US | All the elements of the archetypal film noir are distilled into a gothic LA tale of greed, sex, and betrayal. |
| *Laura | 1944 US | Gene Tierney is an exquisite iridescent angel and Dana Andrews a stolid cop who nails the killer after falling for a dead dame. |
| *Murder, My Sweet | 1944 US | (Aka Farewell, my Lovely). The most noir fun you will ever have. Raymond Chandler’s prose crackles with moody noir direction from Edward Dmytryk. |
| *The Way You Wanted Me | 1944 Finland | “Sellaisena kuin sinä minut halusit” (original title). A dark frenzied tale of a fallen woman, The Way You Wanted Me careens across roads of melodrama at the speed of light. Hyper-expressionism and a tragedy played out in dark nights of the soul. |
| *Mildred Pierce | 1945 US | Joan Crawford in classy melodrama by Michael Curtiz lensed by Ernest Haller. Self-made woman escapes morass of greed. |
| *The Lost Weekend | 1945 US | ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can’t take quiet desperation.’ Ray Milland against type on a bender. |
| *Ride the Pink Horse | 1946 US | Disillusioned WW2 vet arrives in a New Mexico town to blackmail a war racketeer. Imbued with a rare humanity. |
| *Scarlet Street | 1946 US | Classic noir from Fritz Lang. Unremitting in its pessimism. A dark mood and pervading doom of devastating intensity. |
| *The Big Sleep | 1946 US | Love’s Vengeance Lost. Darker than Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet. Bogart is tougher, more driven, and morally suspect. |
| *The Killers | 1946 US | Siodmak’s classic noir. Burt Lancaster’s masterful debut performance in a tragedy of a decent man destroyed by fate. |
| *The Postman Always Rings Twice | 1946 US | Fate ensures adulterous lovers who murder the woman’s husband, suffer definite and final retribution. |
| *Body and Soul | 1947 US | A masterwork. Melodramatic expose of the fight game and a savage indictment of money capitalism. Garfield’s picture. |
| *Brighton Rock | 1947 UK | Greatest British noir is dark and chilling. A cinematic tour-de-force: from the direction and cinematography to top cast and editing. |
| *Nightmare Alley | 1947 US | Predatory femme-fatale uses greed not sex to trap her prey in a hell of hangmen at the bottom of an empty gin bottle. |
| *Nora Prentiss | 1947 US | Doctor is plunged into a dark pool of noir angst in a turbo-charged melodrama of tortured loyalty and thwarted passion. |
| *Odd Man Out | 1947 UK | Betrayal, avarice, and spirituality are all given a place in this tale of an IRA heist gone wrong. The poetry is in the dark yet glistening visuals as we follow fugitive James Mason on his path through Ulster at night and in the rain. |
| *Out of the Past | 1947 US | Quintessential film noir. Inspired direction, exquisite expressionist cinematography, and legendary Mitchum and Greer. |
| *The Gangster | 1947 US | Hell of a b-movie. Very dark noir ‘opera’ brutally critiques the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. Bravado Dalton Trumbo script. |
| *The Lady From Shanghai | 1947 US | Orson Welles’ brilliant jigsaw noir with a femme-fatale to die for and a script so sharp you relish every scene. |
| *T-Men | 1947 US | Mann and Alton offer a visionary descent into a noir realm of dark tenements, nightclubs, mobsters, and hellish steam baths. |
| *Act of Violence | 1948 US | Long-shot and deep focus climax filmed night-for-night on a railway platform: the stuff noirs are made of. |
| *Drunken Angel | 1948 Japan | Aka ‘Yoidore tenshi’. Kurosawa noir. A loser doctor with soul takes on the fetid moral swamp of Yakuza degradation. |
| *Force of Evil | 1948 US | Polonsky transcends noir in a tragic allegory on greed and family. Garfield adds signature honesty and gritty complexity . |
| *Hollow Triumph | 1948 US | Baroque journey to perdition traversing a noir topography redolent with noir archetypes. Audacious and enthralling. |
| *Raw Deal | 1948 US | Sublime noir from Anthony Mann and John Alton. Knockout cast in a strong story stunningly rendered as expressionist art. |
| *They Live by Night | 1948 US | Nicholas Ray’s first feature. A tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions which transcends film noir. |
| *Too Late For Tears | 1948 US | Preposterous chance event launches wild descent into dark avarice and eroticised violence as relentless as fate. |
| *Bitter Rice | 1949 Italy | Aka ‘Riso Amaro’. Classic neo-realist socialist melodrama. Homme-fatale destroys a passionate innocent. A bad girl is redeemed and homme-fatale meets a gruesome noir end in an abattoir. |
| *Border Incident | 1949 US | Subversive expressionist noir from Dir Anthony Mann DP John Alton and writer John C Higgin indicts US agribusiness. |
| *Criss-Cross | ||