Directed by John Huston • 1941 • United States
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor

A cinematic landmark for a number of reasons—it was the first film directed by John Huston, the film that launched Humphrey Bogart to stardom, and one of the first true noirs—this breathlessly entert...

Directed by Charles Vidor • 1946 • United States
Starring Rita Hayworth, Glenn Ford, George Macready

“Gilda, are you decent?” Rita Hayworth tosses her hair back and slyly responds, “Me?” in one of the great star entrances in movie history. GILDA, directed by Charles Vidor, features a sultry Hayw...

Directed by Fritz Lang • 1953 • United States
Starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Lee Marvin

Fritz Lang’s hard-boiled cop vs. criminals yarn stars Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion, a police detective and family man driven by grief to conduct a relentless vendetta against a mobster (Alexander Scourby)...

Directed by John Farrow • 1948 • United States
Starring Ray Milland, Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Sullivan

One of the finest suspense thrillers of the 1940s, THE BIG CLOCK stars Ray Milland as a hapless crime-magazine editor plunged into a web of danger when he begins being systematically framed ...

Directed by Billy Wilder • 1944 • United States
Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

Has dialogue ever been more perfectly hard-boiled? Has a femme fatale ever been as deliciously wicked as Barbara Stanwyck? And has 1940s Los Angeles ever looked so seductively sordid? Wo...

Directed by Otto Preminger • 1944 • United States
Starring Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb

One of the most sophisticated noirs of the 1940s, Otto Preminger’s classic mystery stars Gene Tierney as Laura Hunt, a Manhattan advertising executive who is murdered just before she is set to mar...

Directed by Nicholas Ray • 1951 • United States
Starring Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ward Bond

When hardened big-city police detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) roughs up one too many suspects, he’s sent to the countryside to cool his heels and help search for the murderer of a small-town schoolg...

Directed by Hugo Haas • 1952 • United States
Starring Hugo Haas, Cleo Moore, Mona Barrie

One of a string of intriguing low-budget noirs directed in Hollywood by Czech actor turned gutter auteur Hugo Haas, STRANGE FASCINATION stars the filmmaker himself as a renowned concert pianist whose relatio...

Directed by Charles Laughton • 1955 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER—incredibly, the only film the great actor Charles Laughton ever directed—is truly a stand-alone masterwork. A horror movie with qualities of a Grimm fairy tale, it s...

Directed by Fritz Lang • 1954 • United States
Starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Broderick Crawford

In this adaptation of Emile Zola’s “La bête humaine,” veteran Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) returns from Korea to his job as a railroad engineer and quickly succumbs to the advances of his boss's wif...

Directed by Raoul Walsh • 1940 • United States
Starring George Raft, Ann Sheridan, Ida Lupino

Humphrey Bogart and George Raft share a driving ambition in this feisty tale of brothers trying to make a go of their independent trucking enterprise. After ten years of the Great Depression, scrappy Jo...

Directed by Raoul Walsh • 1941 • United States
Starring Ida Lupino, Humphrey Bogart, Alan Curtis

Marking the moment when the gritty gangster sagas of the 1930s began giving way to the romantic fatalism of ’40s film noir, HIGH SIERRA also contains the star-making performance of Humphrey Bogart, w...

Directed by Archie Mayo • 1942 • United States
Starring Jean Gabin, Ida Lupino, Thomas Mitchell

French screen legend Jean Gabin made his Hollywood debut in this broodingly fatalistic noir melodrama. He stars as an alcoholic dockworker who, following a night of heavy drinking, wakes up with no me...

Directed by Lewis Allen • 1947 • United States
Starring John Hodiak, Lizabeth Scott, Burt Lancaster

Lurid Technicolor, deep-dish melodrama, and gay subtext abound in this pulpy noir firecracker. In the desert town of Chuckawalla, Nevada, tempers flare, passions spark, and violence erupts when Pa...

Directed by Blake Edwards • 1962 • United States
Starring Lee Remick, Glenn Ford

Following the success of BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, producer-director Blake Edwards took a detour into noir territory with this ultra-stylish, mood-drenched thriller. Lee Remick plays a San Francisco bank clerk who is ...

Directed by Samuel Fuller • 1959 • United States
Starring Victoria Shaw, Glenn Corbett, James Shigeta

Pulp maestro Samuel Fuller lends his slam-bang stylistic punch to this complex, fascinating noir that doubles as a trenchant social document of 1950s America. When a stripper is murdered in LA’s...

Criterion Collection Edition #966

Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer • 1945 • United States
Starring Tom Neal, Ann Savage

From Poverty Row came a movie that, perhaps more than any other, epitomizes the dark fatalism at the heart of film noir. As he hitchhikes his way from New York to Los Angeles, a do...

Directed by Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough • 1950 • United Kingdom
Starring Jean Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson

Mystery and menace are afoot at the 1889 Paris Exposition in this tense thriller from the studio that made atmospheric period dramas its specialty, Gainsborough Pictures...