Directed by John Farrow • 1948 • United States
Starring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Russell, John Lund

Noir fatalism and shivery supernatural menace merge in this atmospheric adaptation of a darkly existential novel by pulp master Cornell Woolrich. Edward G. Robinson stars as John Triton, a stage m...

Directed by John Farrow • 1949 • United States
Starring Ray Milland, Audrey Totter, Thomas Mitchell

A seductively evil Ray Milland is a devil in disguise in this unique noir take on the Faust legend, a fiendish fusion of crime thriller and dark fantasy. In his quest to clean up his city’s crimin...

Directed by Ossie Davis • 1970 • United States
Starring Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, Calvin Lockhart

Acclaimed actor and filmmaker Ossie Davis directs this rollicking blend of gritty neonoir and buddy-cop comedy, one of the first and most influential of the cycle of Blaxploitation fil...

Directed by Don Siegel • 1968 • United States
Starring Richard Widmark, Henry Fonda, Inger Stevens

A key prototype of the gritty, morally murky police procedurals that would proliferate in the 1970s, this lean, mean urban thriller from Don Siegel stars Richard Widmark as the eponymous New York C...

Directed by Barry Shear • 1972 • United States
Starring Anthony Quinn, Yaphet Kotto, Anthony Franciosa

Evocatively shot on location in 1970s Harlem, this gut-punching crime drama combines film noir and blaxploitation tropes into an explosive portrait of simmering social and racial tensions. Yaph...

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 Sidney Gilliat • 1946 • United Kingdom
Starring Trevor Howard, Sally Gray, Alastair Sim

In the midst of Nazi air raids, a postman dies on the operating table at a rural English hospital. But was the death accidental? A delightful and wholly unexpected murder mystery, British writer/d...

Directed by Edward Dmytryk • 1949 • United Kingdom
Starring Robert Newton, Sally Gray, Naunton Wayne

The first film director Edward Dmytryk made in England after being blacklisted from Hollywood is a wittily inventive blend of black comedy and suspense in which the investigation by a Scotland Ya...

Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger • 1949 • United Kingdom
Starring David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, Jack Hawkins

After the lavish Technicolor spectacle of THE RED SHOES, British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger retreated into the inward, shadowy recesses of this mood...

Directed by Anthony Asquith • 1950 • United Kingdom
Starring Jean Kent, Dirk Bogarde, John McCallum

Fortune teller Agnes Huston (Jean Kent), a.k.a. Madame Astra, has been murdered—but that’s about all anyone can agree on as five different perspectives on the dead woman’s personality come to ligh...

Directed by Cy Endfield • 1957 • United Kingdom
Starring Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, Peggy Cummins

Blacklisted from Hollywood, American director Cy Endfield found a fresh start in Britain, where he brought a pronounced anticapitalist punch to this exciting crime drama set in the trucking industr...

Directed by Joseph Losey • 1957 • United Kingdom
Starring Michael Redgrave, Ann Todd, Leo McKern

On the day before his estranged son is scheduled to be executed for a murder he didn’t commit, an alcoholic writer (a riveting Michael Redgrave) embarks on a last-ditch attempt to save him, journeyin...

Directed by Basil Dearden • 1962 • United Kingdom

Othello is translated to the world of sixties London jazz clubs in Basil Dearden's smoky and sensational All Night Long. Over the course of one eventful evening, the anniversary celebration of the musical and romantic partners Aurelius Rex (Pau...

Directed by Olivier Assayas • 2002 • France
Starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny

“No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don’t understand.” So observes Connie Nielsen in Olivier Assayas’s hallucinatory, globe-spanning DEMONLOVER, a postmodern neonoir thriller and med...

Directed by David Lynch • 1997 • United States
Starring Bill Pullman, Patricia Arquette, Balthazar Getty

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?” A mesmerizing meditation on the mysterious nature of identity, LOST HIGHWAY, David Lynch’s seventh feature film, is one of the filmmaker’s most potent cinemati...

Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen • 1984 • United States
Starring John Getz, Frances McDormand, Dan Hedaya

Joel and Ethan Coen's career-long darkly comic road trip through misfit America began with this razor-sharp, hard-boiled neonoir set somewhere in Texas, where a sleazy bar owner releases...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1963 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Kyoko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi

Toshiro Mifune is unforgettable as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a cold-blooded kidnapper in HIGH AND LOW (TENGOKU TO JIGOKU), the highly influential domesti...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1949 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura

A bad day gets worse for young detective Murakami when a pickpocket steals his gun on a hot, crowded bus. Desperate to right the wrong, he goes undercover, scavenging Tokyo’s sweltering streets for the stray dog w...

Directed by Seijun Suzuki • 1966 • Japan
Starring Tetsuya Watari, Chieko Matsubara, Tamio Kawaji

In this jazzy gangster film, reformed killer Tetsu’s attempt to go straight is thwarted when his former cohorts call him back to Tokyo to help battle a rival gang. Director Seijun Suzuki’s onslaught ...

Directed by Michael Mann • 1986 • United States
Starring William Petersen, Kim Greist, Joan Allen

Michael Mann’s hypnotic, hyperstylized adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel “Red Dragon” was the first film to introduce audiences to the infamous Hannibal Lecter. Will Graham (William Petersen) is a...

Directed by Akira Kurosawa • 1960 • Japan
Starring Toshiro Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Tatsuya Mihashi

A young executive hunts down his father’s killer in director Akira Kurosawa’s scathing THE BAD SLEEP WELL. Continuing his legendary collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa combines element...

Directed by Seijun Suzuki • 1967 • Japan

When Japanese New Wave bad boy Seijun Suzuki delivered this brutal, hilarious, and visually inspired masterpiece to the executives at his studio, he was promptly fired. Branded to Kill tells the ecstatically bent story of a yakuza assassin with a fetish f...

Directed by Michael Mann • 1981 • United States
Starring James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Robert Prosky

The contemporary American auteur Michael Mann’s bold artistic sensibility was already fully formed when he burst out of the gate with THIEF, his debut feature. James Caan stars, in one of his most ri...

Directed by Jules Dassin • 1948 • United States
Starring Barry Fitzgerald, Howard Duff, Dorothy Hart

“There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” as the narrator immortally states at the close of this breathtakingly vivid film and this is one of them. Master noir craftsman Jules Dassin a...