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2 days ago · 100 Best Film Noir Movies Ranked by Tomatometer. If you’ve got a bottle of whiskey, a ceiling fan lazily revolving above you, and a good eye for trouble (especially when it comes sauntering...
- Double Indemnity (1944) Video essay on Double Indemnity. Double Indemnity is the poster child of film noir, almost inevitably so. Directed by Billy Wilder and with a script co-penned by Raymond Chandler, it epitomizes the genre from the foundation up.
- Sunset Boulevard (1950) The Take’s video essay on Sunset Boulevard. Though Sunset Boulevard is among director Billy Wilder's best films, purists don't always consider it film noir.
- The Third Man (1949) Insider Information on The Third Man. Film noir populated theaters at a significant time in history: the end of World War II. The best film noir movies tend to draw on that, but The Third Man has a noteworthy lens on that era since it was made in the UK rather than America.
- In a Lonely Place (1950) Video essay on In a Lonely Place. With all the film noir set in Los Angeles, there had to be one about the inner workings of Hollywood, right?
1. Sunset Boulevard. 1950 1h 50m Approved. 8.4 (237K) Rate. 94 Metascore. A screenwriter develops a dangerous relationship with a faded film star determined to make a triumphant return. Director Billy Wilder Stars William Holden Gloria Swanson Erich von Stroheim. 2. Vertigo.
Nov 3, 2023 · The 100 Best Film Noirs of All Time. Since its coining in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank, who observed from afar something dark, quite literally, going on at the American cinema, the term...
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- House of Bamboo
- Stolen Death
- Brighton Rock
- One False Move
- Caught
- While The City Sleeps
- The American Friend
- The Postman Always Rings Twice
- The Asphalt Jungle
- The Killers
House of Bamboo wants to be a lush, romantic CinemaScope thriller and a Samuel Fuller movie at once. The director’s admirers will recognize those aims as almost genetically contradictory, as Fuller thrives on bold, often vitally threadbare aesthetics that suggest the visual embodiment of a tabloid headline. Indeed, Fuller’s best films don’t have mu...
Echoes of German Expressionism abound in Nyrki Tapiovaara’s tough-minded, class-conscious Stolen Death, an early Nordic noir about gun-smuggling Finnish revolutionaries opposing the Russians occupying their country in the early 20th century. Tapiovaara’s unique blend of off-kilter compositions, unconventional camera angles, foreboding high-contrast...
One of the more terrifyingly amoral, sociopathic villains in all of noir, Richard Attenborough’s Pinky is at 17 already a slave to his nihilism. Consumed by a seemingly bottomless abyss of anger, paranoia, and, in typical Graham Greene fashion, Catholic guilt, Pinky hides behind a mostly stoic visage, teasing out a smile only when he’s trying to wi...
Released days after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, One False Move offers a particularly prescient reflection of regional division and segregation still powerfully evident in Donald Trump’s America. It sees violence as the common denominator between blue and red states, a casual fact of life that cannot be stopped no matter your ethnicity or background...
Max Ophüls’s Caught offers an intense corrective to the clichés of the American noir, particularly the perception of a woman as a predatory other who pulls all the strings, leading men downward toward a doom for which they often bear implicatively little personal responsibility. Right out of the gate, Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes) is understoo...
From his Weimar films all the way through his Hollywood productions, Fritz Lang evinced a deep suspicion of any and all institutions of authority. Alongside Ace in the Hole and Sweet Smell of Success, While the City Sleeps is the most cynical and piercing of noirs to place journalism in its crosshairs. The film’s killer is a by-the-numbers figure w...
Loosely based on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, The American Friend wears its love of the United States and its cinematic lineage on its sleeve. From its engagement with genre tropes (particularly noir), to its tangibly grimy urban backdrops, to its archetypal hero/villain dramatic dichotomy, there’s no mistaking the film’s American influence....
The Postman Always Rings Twice is a simple, deliciously depraved film. Based on the James M. Cain novel, the story concerns a feckless drifter (John Garfield) who at a roadside inn crosses paths with the owner’s beautiful and dissatisfied wife (Lana Turner), a woman his match in both sexual appetite and sociopathy. United in lust and a general disd...
The Asphalt Jungle could be understood as a hardening of John Huston’s directorial vision, breaking away from Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and any greater conquest of cool for pathetic men whose minds have gone rotten from being left on the slab for too long. Dix (Sterling Hayden) is first seen woozily stumbling into a diner, which is apt given ...
Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story “The Killers” is a marvel of implication and showing rather than telling. Robert Siodmak’s adaptation opens with a beat-for-beat adaptation of the story that neatly functions as a self-contained short, elegantly alluding to the oppression that’s evident in the nooks and crannies of a lunch counter’s interiors, wh...
Sep 19, 2017 · The 20 Best Film Noir Movies of All Time, Ranked. On the 20-year anniversary of 'L.A. Confidential' we put together a film noir list that'll hopefully create new fans of the...
Feb 7, 2024 · The darkest, grittiest, and most memorable movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age have come from the film noir genre which produced some of the best movies of all time. Featuring corrupt cops, cunning criminals, darling dames, and frantic femme fatales, film noirs were generally stylistic Hollywood crime dramas with a much darker twist that pushed ...
