The 30 Best Film Noir Movies of All Time

Welcome to the dark side of the American dream.

The best film noir movies of all time are visions of a universally known truth not always spoken out loud: It can be really hard to live in America, and if you don’t have money, you have nothing. If Westerns are about “manifest destiny,” film noir is about what comes after. If you do finally get the swimming pool, you might end up face-down dead in it, like poor William Holden’s struggling screenwriter in “Sunset Boulevard.” Or you may have entered a miserable marriage to get your gilded palace. In film noir, you might have that gilded palace all to yourself if you’re willing to murder for it. Take a look at “Double Indemnity.” This genre is all about recognizing that some success in America might not be attainable through legal means, and so working outside the law becomes a tantalizing temptation, even if you’ll inevitably be caught.

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These desires lay in the shadows, and therefore noir developed an expressionistic grammar, one full of stylized, high-contrast lighting for heightened mood and dramatic effect. Many of its greatest practitioners, such as Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and Fritz Lang, came to Hollywood from Europe (as indicated by the very name “film noir,” first coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, let alone that shadowy cinematography lifted from 1920s German cinema). As immigrants, they were even more intimately familiar with the promises and challenges of life in America. Those from Germany and Austria were considered “enemy aliens,” even though though they came to America fleeing the Nazis, and had to obey an 8:00pm curfew among other restrictions during the war years.

The iconography of film noir is instantly recognizable: The femme fatale, the Homburg, lit cigarettes and the play of light through their smoke, rye whiskey, tinny pianos, trench coats, and revolvers. These are stories about taking what you can’t earn and then losing everything (as was de rigeur in the days of the Production Code). For the purposes of IndieWire’s 30 Best Film Noir Movies of All Time list, we’re restricting our films to those made before 1964. The postwar years were the most fecund time for the genre as G.I.’s returned to find that many problems lurked at home, especially amid a new consumerist mindset that would come to define the 1950s. In the future, we’ll have a neo noir list.

For now, read on for the 30 Best Film Noir Movies of All Time. That’s one film for every day of Noirvember, the celebration of noir that occurs online each November as created by writer Marya E. Gates.

With editorial contributions from Wilson Chapman, Bill Desowitz, Jim Hemphill, Mark Peikert, Sarah Shachat, Anne Thompson, and Brian Welk.

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