The 20 Best Film Noir Movies of All Time (2024)

20. ‘Christmas Holiday’ (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1944)

Universal’s answer to Judy Garland, Deanna Durbin needed a career shift by the mid-’40s. Enter this remarkably bleak, highly stylized noir from director Robert Siodmak and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz that casts Durbin as a chanteuse at a sleazy New Orleans club whose backstory is tantalizingly revealed over the course of the film. Unlike most noir heroines, she did not lead to her husband’s downfall — Gene Kelly (in his only heel turn) is a born sociopath and murderer, whose crimes so disgust Durbin that she does the very 1940s movie thing of debasing herself at the club to atone. (At least she gets to sing Frank Loesser’s ‘Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year,’ written for the film.) Durbin herself once called ‘Christmas Holiday’ her only ‘really good film.’ Watching it now, with its complicated structure, carefully constructed images, and Durbin’s transformation from girlish to hardened, one can’t argue. —MP

19. ‘Night and the City’ (dir. Jules Dassin, 1950)

Noir is often seen as a distinctly American genre, which makes the cultural fusion on display in ‘Night and the City’ all the more fascinating. American director Jules Dassin made the film right as the Hollywood Blacklist closed in on him, making the film in Britain in part to avoid the effects of the Un-American Activities Committee. The result is a film that looks at the foggy streets of London from a distinctly American lens, following the frantic schemes of U.S. expat Harry Fabian (a perfectly sleazy Richard Widmark) in the late-night world of the British capital, where greedy nightclub owners keep their associates under a heavy thumb and boxing rivalries prove particularly deadly. Even by the standards of noir, ‘Night and the City’ is a bleak work of scumbag cinema, a darkly shot story of a loser in a cruel world who doesn’t quite deserve the pathos for his fate to be labeled a tragedy. It’s hard not to feel some of Dassin’s own anxieties, as he was being pushed out of Hollywood by bureaucratic forces, in Fabian’s sweaty, desperate journey. —WC

18. ‘The Hitch-hiker’ (dir. Ida Lupino, 1953)

In many ways, ‘The Hitch-Hiker’ does what it says on the tin. It’s the story of two men (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) whose fishing trip is derailed when they pick up a man (William Talman) by the side of the road who doesn’t just need a ride — he is an armed killer on the run from the law. Will the murderer get the better of his good Samaritans or will they be able to turn the tables? What makes the film special is that director Ida Lupino understands psychological torment is something that can actually be so personal. ‘The Hitch-Hiker’ is a masterclass in how to sustain tension for 70 minutes and not a second more on a shoestring budget, but it also feels like Lupino makes exactly the right dramatic choice to frame all three men in such striking, desperate shadows and to pay as much attention to the gun between them as to their faces. This is a tight, tense, intimate film — and an uncompromising one. There’s often a fatalistic thread in noir, as men who are haunted by the rottenness of the world walk knowingly into traps. But rarely has noir felt more like a sickness than it does on O’Brien, Lovejoy, and Talman’s sweaty faces, with nothing in the bleak desert landscape that can offer relief. They should’ve let Lupino make more movies.—SS

17. ‘Dark Passage’ (dir. Delmer Daves, 1947)

Most viewers today come to Delmer Daves’ ‘Dark Passage’ for its first 30 or so minutes, which are shot from a mostly first-person perspective. It feels frankly wild to contemplate that in the year 1947, for the Bogart/Bacall picture that followed ‘The Big Sleep,’ we start by not being able to see Humphrey Bogart’s mug at all; then we spend a long time with him under bandages post-plastic surgery. Considering the weight of the cameras that cinematographer Sidney Hickox had to maneuver into canny locations to make Lauren Bacall look so steely and cool, it’s maybe a blessing that this phase of the film transitions to more standard noir fare, with our two heroes trying to stay ahead of those who would exploit Bogey’s status as an escaped fugitive.

But it’s instructive to look at ‘Dark Passage’ for more than its key gimmick and crime thriller plot. There’s an unhinged hallucination sequence when Bogart goes under for surgery, for one, and a truly unhinged performance (the best kind) from Agnes Moorehead for another. ‘Dark Passage’ is alive with a kind of experimentation and willingness to embrace strange, big swings that would probably get noted to death today. Though the film probably wouldn’t work without the fact that Bogart and Bacall’s chemistry can burn nitrate, the sheer weirdness of ‘Dark Passage’ makes it a perfect noir hidden gem.—SS

16. ‘Niagara’ (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1953)

Director Henry Hathaway was best known for large-scale action films (‘Lives of a Bengal Lancer,’ ‘How the West Was Won’), so in this emotionally constricted film noir set largely in a motel you can feel him straining against his limitations. It’s all the better, since Hathaway’s frustrations infect the film as a whole, giving it an almost unbearable sense of claustrophobia even though it’s set against the backdrop of Niagara Falls! Marilyn Monroe has her first starring role in the convoluted tale of murder and adultery, and she’s so mesmerizing that she throws the balance off a bit — even when Joseph Cotton becomes the focus of the film’s narrative, Monroe can’t help but draw the camera’s (and the audiences’) attention away from him. This gives the movie an off-kilter quality that’s ultimately quite effective, as is the stunning color cinematography — there’s a lush, gorgeous quality in ‘Niagara’ that’s unusual for a film noir, and completely mesmerizing. —JH

15. ‘The Lady from Shanghai’ (dir. Orson Welles, 1947)

Orson Welles’ 1948 film noir was his last studio feature before he spent the next 30 years globetrotting and making one low-budget masterpiece (‘Othello,’ ‘Mr. Arkadin,’ ‘The Trial,’ ‘Chimes at Midnight’) after another, with only the interruption of an even greater film noir, ‘Touch of Evil’ in 1958, marking a temporary return to Hollywood. Welles was always at heart an independent filmmaker, which creates an odd sort of tension in ‘Shanghai’; it’s his most superficially conventional film, a glossy star vehicle for his soon to be ex-wife Rita Hayworth with a traditional thriller plot about a man framed for murder, but Welles is too interested in the idiosyncrasies around the edges to deliver the mainstream satisfactions the premise calls for. Instead, he provides one of his many scathing meditations on the corrosive nature of greed and power and uses the story (and studio resources) as a pretext for some truly stunning set pieces, the most famous of which is the frequently imitated shoot-out in a hall of mirrors that climaxes the picture. Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn’s meddling left ‘The Lady from Shanghai,’ like so many of Welles’ films, a mutilated masterpiece, but even in its truncated form it’s dazzling. —JH

14. ‘Leave Her to Heaven’ (dir. John M. Stahl, 1945)

Had director John M. Stahl never directed this feverish film, his name would be a footnote as the man whose ’30s tearjerkers (‘Imitation of Life,’ ‘Magnificent Obsession’) got remade bigger and splashier by Douglas Sirk in the 1950s. Luckily for fans of noir, Technicolor, Gene Tierney, and accessories, he has this truly subversive film to keep his name on lists like these. Starring Tierney as a pathologically jealous woman, only the sheer force of the blazing Technicolor can match (and enhance) her star turn. Crimson lips, slanting eyes, and razor-sharp cheekbones fill the frame as Tierney purses her lips and contemplates what dastardly deeds need doing to keep hubby Cornell Wilde all to herself. Forget the classic femme fatale — can you imagine how unsettling it was for 1945 audiences to watch a wife systematically destroy the American family unit? Jeanne Crain’s sweetly suffering ‘gal with a hoe’ could never. —MP

13. ‘The Reckless Moment’ (dir. Max Ophuls, 1949)

Speaking of the family unit, it comes in for a drubbing in Max Ophuls’s noir starring Joan Bennett and James Mason (later remade as ‘The Deep End,’ starring Tilda Swinton). A wife and mother tasked with keeping the home fires burning while her husband is away, Bennett is sleepwalking through life until her daughter’s rogue boyfriend ends up dead — and she ends up in league (and maybe in love) with a gentlemanly blackmailer whose boss is less inclined to help an overwhelmed mother out. Criminally underseen, it’s a key film in Bennett’s transformation from femme fatale to matriarch, as she plays a woman whose own existence has been so constricted by responsibility that only extreme circumstances can make her feel alive again. And though the film ends on a semi-happy note, Ophuls’ camera frames Bennett within the staircase banister, leaving us the memorable image of her enclosed behind the bars of her suburban prison, surrounded by her happy family. —MP

12. ‘The Maltese Falcon’ (dir. John Huston, 1941)

Does Mary Astor’s Brigid O’Shaugnessy say a single honest thing throughout ‘The Maltese Falcon?’ Is that even her real name? And does Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade, so blasé, sarcastic, and disconnected about anything other than the cash in her purse, even care? John Huston’s film has all the hallmarks of quintessential film noir: The hard-boiled detective, the untrustworthy femme fatale, the twisty mess of motivations, the canted angles and towering ceilings, and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet just because? It’s an ideal entry point into the genre, and a great way to teach aspiring film buffs what a MacGuffin is. —BW

11. ‘The Woman in the Window’ (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944)

There are a couple times when Hollywood tried to position Fritz Lang as another Hitchcock (most notably with his wartime thrillers ‘Man Hunt’ and ‘Ministry of Fear’). Then there are the times when Lang’s full, black-hearted plunge into the deepest recesses of the human psyche are really able to rip. ‘The Woman in the Window’ is a direct conduit into a man’s lizard brain, his desires and fears commingling in an exceptionally powerful way, and beyond the Catholic guilt-logic Hitchcock would have applied to the scenario. We won’t say exactly why that’s the case, so that you can discover that for yourself if you’ve never seen ‘The Woman in the Window.’

Here’s the setup: College professor Edward G. Robinson sees a painting of a beautiful woman in a storefront window near his Midtown Manhattan club. Suddenly the actual woman who was painted appears as a reflection in the window too, standing beside him. She takes him to his apartment, and a night of romance seems to be in store — never mind that Robinson’s character is married (his wife and kids are conveniently on vacation). Suddenly, this mysterious woman’s ex-lover barges in and tries to kill him. Robinson’s character fights back and kills his attacker in self-defense. Now he has a body to dispose of… and no way he could ever possibly tell the police what happened without losing his family and his position at the university. This is a film that directly interrogates how the camera is used as a vehicle for straight male desire, and how directly the idea of the femme fatale depends on the male gaze. It’s also incredibly funny too: A 10-year-old boy scout ultimately finds the body Robinson’s character dumps in the woods, and announces, ‘If I get the reward, I will send my younger brother to some good college, and I will go to Harvard.’ Even the darker noirs can have a little levity! —CB

10. ‘Sweet Smell of Success’ (dir. Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

Another film noir that has gained stature over the years, earning no Oscar nominations at the time, is ‘Sweet Smell of Success,’ which stars two movie stars at their peak delivering equally venal performances. Burt Lancaster is the corrupt and powerful New York newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker, who will write anything to get what he wants, and Tony Curtis is his eager-to-please patsy press agent Sidney Falco, who will do anything to get into Hunsecker’s column. Their acid dialogue was written by clever duo Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman. (Sidney Falco: ‘If I’m gonna go out on a limb for you, you gotta know what’s involved!’ J.J. Hunsecker: ‘My right hand hasn’t seen my left hand in 30 years.’) Elmer Bernstein supplies a propulsive jazz score that throbs with the heartbeat of the city, which is shot in all its black-and-white glory by James Wong Howe. It’s a mighty combo. —AT

9. ‘The Night of the Hunter’ (dir. Charles Laughton, 1955)

The great actor Charles Laughton only ever made one film behind the camera, but he left his mark with ‘The Night of the Hunter,’ a jaw dropping and haunting fairy tale of good vs. evil and how faith can be manipulated and weaponized. Robert Mitchum as ‘Preacher’ Harry Powell delivers one of the great movie villain performances. He charms gullible townsfolk with his baritone hymns and compelling sermons on the battle between love and hate (anyone who has ever written on their knuckles owes a debt to this film). But as the film says, he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, crazed and twisted as when we see him dangling upside down from his prison bunk bed. The idyllic and storybook-like shots make it more monster movie than noir, but the cathedral-like framing of the Harper home has some of the most stunning black and white cinematography, courtesy of Stanley Cortez, of the entire genre. —BW

8. ‘Touch of Evil’ (dir. Orson Welles, 1958)

One of the most exhilarating opening sequences of all time — a three-and-a-half minute single take of happy newlyweds Miguel and Susie Vargas (Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh) walking across the U.S.-Mexico border, enhanced by a propulsive Henry Mancini track — wasn’t the one that director Orson Welles had in mind. Hired by Heston, Welles had planned a more naturalistic ticking bomb scenario without music, but like many of his movies, he lost control of the final edit. (Many of us remain attached to the original opening.) Welles did a 10-day rewrite of the contemporary Whit Masterson novel ‘Badge of Evil’ (1956).

‘Touch of Evil’ also starred Janet Leigh, Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff and Marlene Dietrich. The portly Welles starred as corrupt detective Hank Quinlan, who plants evidence to put his suspects in jail. When Vargas catches him in the act, Quinlan and his gangster cohorts kidnap and drug Susie, who is tortured by the sordid motel’s manager (a brilliant Dennis Weaver).

At one point, Quinlan’ asks his world-weary chum Tanya (Dietrich) to read his future. ‘You haven’t got any,’ she says. ‘Hmm? What do you mean?’ ‘Your future’s all used up.’ Indeed. When the movie was first released, reviews were mixed, but it won best film at the Brussels World Film Festival. Over time the film gained supporters for Welles’ inventive mise-en-scene as he deployed the camera in new ways, keeping the viewer on edge. Eventually, thanks to Welles’ meticulous notes on what he wanted the film to be and a group of heroic restorers, a film closely resembling Welles’ director’s cut was released in 1998, earning prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and National Society of Film Critics. —AT

7. ‘Strangers on a Train’ (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

With all due respect to ‘Challengers,’ the best tennis scene in film is Farley Granger peering out into a crowd at a match and seeing Robert Walker’s Bruno Antony staring straight ahead at him while every other pair of eyes bounces back and forth with the volley. The ‘Challengers’ reference isn’t far off, as there’s also quite a bit of queer coding in Bruno, the psychopathic killer seen draped in robes, getting his nails filed, and lying in wait as Granger enters his bedroom. Walker, who passed away shortly after the film was released, is a tantalizing charmer and layered, tortured character. The ‘crisscross’ premise seems so simple, but there’s nothing so simple about Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Strangers on a Train’ at all. —BW

6. ‘Laura’ (dir. Otto Preminger, 1944)

A movie that ends with the killer stalking his victim — while a radio broadcast plays of him giving a lecture about great lovers in history — is going to be one of the great movies of all time by default. But that’s just one of the many arch, on-the-nose ‘ironic’ touches that gives ‘Laura’ an enduringly contemporary sensibility: Laura herself, a society powerhouse brutally murdered in her prime, is someone we initially don’t meet, except via her ravishing wall-mounted portrait. In another time, she’d be one of Capote’s swans. This is a film thus told via the gossip of her friends and associates, among them Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), introduced in immortal fashion by writing on a typewriter in his bathtub. There are tragic noirs, procedural noirs, cynical noirs, and then there’s Otto Preminger’s crackling, cackling film (taken over from original director Rouben Mamoulian) which can only be called a bitchy noir. It’s a wonder Ryan Murphy hasn’t tried to remake it. And then of course, there’s that twist.

Gene Tierney was already on the rise in noirdom with ‘The Shanghai Gesture,’ but she wrote herself into the genre forever as the title character, seen largely in flashback. And for Preminger, more noir assignments would follow, including ‘Fallen Angel,’ ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends,’ and the only movie that could possibly be a greater exercise in ’80s primetime soap-worthy excess, ‘Angel Face.’ —CB

5. ‘Double Indemnity’ (dir. Billy Wilder, 1944)

When you think of film noir, you think of the femme fatale –– mysterious, seductive women with chips on their shoulders, as beautiful as they are deadly. And no femme fatale has been as venomous and as enticing as Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson, an unhappy housewife who seduces Fred MacMurray’s slick insurance salesman into a murder plot. Adapting James M. Cain’s crime novel with co-writer Raymond Chandler, Billy Wilder makes a noir that’s the platonic ideal of ‘hard-boiled,’ from the punchy, cynical dialogue to the gorgeous, murky cinematography of John Seitz that makes Los Angeles look and feel like a place of ever-present danger. In this fractured world, Stanwyck’s unforgettable portrait of a cold-hearted snake of a woman, one that radiates danger even as she lures you in with sheer charisma, is what makes ‘Double Indemnity’ such an indelible story of desire and betrayal. —WC

4. ‘The Big Sleep’ (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946)

Written by Leigh Blackett, William Faulkner, and Jules Furthman, Hawks’ frequent writer who helped to invent ‘Slim’ in ‘To Have and Have Not,’ the film that introduced Lauren Bacall and launched her love affair with Humphrey Bogart, ‘The Big Sleep’ continues to pursue that frisson. This time, Bogart is Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe. But the star couple was bigger than the material: Warner Bros. reshot the original 1945 version to enhance the now-married couple’s badinage, which was a smart move. (Vivian: ‘You go too far, Marlowe.’ Marlowe: ‘Those are harsh words to throw at a man, especially when he’s walking out of your bedroom.’) Based on the much frothier hardboiled Chandler novel, the cleaned-up movie plot made no sense. Yet it has endured as a much-imitated classic mystery noir, even if the mystery itself will never be solved.

At one point during production, as Furthman and Hawks furiously rewrote the script on the fly, they asked Chandler if one character committed suicide or was murdered. Chandler wrote back that he ‘didn’t know either.’ Tthe movie holds up despite the plot holes. ‘…It is one of the great films noir, a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler’s ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares,’ wrote Roger Ebert. —AT

3. ‘The Third Man’ (dir. Carol Reed, 1949)

Just about everyone is talking in Graham Greene’s script for ‘The Third Man,’ but no one is willing to truly say or reveal anything. Everyone has an agenda, everyone has a secret, and the deeper Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) goes in his pursuit to find Harry Lime (a fiendish Orson Welles at his best with an all-time line reading about cuckoo clocks), the shadows on the Vienna buildings grow darker and more imposing and the zither music grows more intoxicating and surreal, until the point when we’re trapped in a labyrinth sewer of darkness we can’t escape. Carol Reed’s film still crackles with energy and urgency, and the German Expressionist-inspired cinematography by Robert Krasker has been frequently imitated but never as perfected as it is here. —BW

2. ‘In a Lonely Place’ (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1950)

It’s subtler than ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ but there’s an anti-Hollywood story lurking underneath the mystery of ‘In a Lonely Place,’ Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece about a toxic love pulsing with deeply felt fear and distrust. Dixon Steele, played with disarming vulnerability by a frequently terrifying Humphrey Bogart, is a man suspected of murder by the police force, and a down-on-his-luck screenwriter who hasn’t had a successful movie since before World War II. The new neighbor he falls in love with, Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), is an aspiring actress new to Hollywood who hasn’t had the innocence beaten out of her from the industry. Their relationship, and the conflict that grows as Laurel finds herself more and more doubtful of Dixon’s innocence, exposes this ingenue to the dark rot underneath the shiny surface of Tinseltown, and the corroding effect that it’s had upon the man’s soul.

A brilliant fusion of noir suspense and pitched-to-the-rafters relationship melodrama, ‘In a Lonely Place’ ends on one of the greatest final scenes in film history, as the realities of who Dixon is leaves the two in a place where there’s no going back. When Laurel says that ‘yesterday this would have meant so much to us, now it doesn’t matter – doesn’t matter at all,’ it feels like a goodbye both to the man himself and to a Hollywood dream. —WC

1. ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (dir. Billy Wilder, 1950)

What becomes a legend most? So many images from Billy Wilder’s blistering critique of Hollywood are embedded in the culture. The film opens with a man face down in a swimming pool. He’s down-on-his-luck screenwriter Joe Gillis (William Holden), who proceeds to narrate the story of how he got there. It starts when he meets a 50-year-old fallen silent film star (Gloria Swanson). He says, ‘You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.’ She says: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ Gillis tries to help her with a script, ‘Salome,’ that she plans to send to Cecil B. DeMille. He falls into a relationship with her; they watch her old movies together. He finds out that the devoted butler (Erich von Stroheim) who writes her fan mail is her first husband.

Written by Wilder and his long-time partner Charles Brackett (with help from D.M. Marshman Jr.), the lines keep coming. After Desmond threatens suicide again, Gillis says, ‘Oh, wake up, Norma, you’d be killing yourself to an empty house. The audience left 20 years ago. Now, face it.’ Desmond says: ‘That’s a lie! They still want me!’ He keeps trying to make her face reality. At the end of the movie she shoots Gillis in the back as he falls into the pool. When she descends the grand staircase to face arrest for murder, the newsreel cameras make her believe she’s back in a movie. Everyone plays along as she says, ‘And I promise you I’ll never desert you again, because after ‘Salome’ we’ll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, and the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!… All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.’

Unforgettable. The movie hit hard then. Nominated for 11 Oscars, it won three. It’s still on the money. —AT