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 Jacques Tourneur • 1956 • United States
Starring Brian Keith, Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft

Directed by Jacques Tourneur from one of the masterful, despairing novels of David Goodis, NIGHTFALL is the tale of an innocent man trapped in a senseless and lethal web of seduction and crime. The...

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 Tay Garnett • 1946 • United States
Starring Lana Turner, John Garfield, Cecil Kellaway

Lana Turner and John Garfield set the screen ablaze with their smoldering chemistry in this erotically charged noir classic based on the novel by James M. Cain. Down-and-out drifter Frank Chambers ...

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 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 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...

Directed by Jacques Tourneur • 1947 • United States
Starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas

Everything you want in a film noir you’ll find in OUT OF THE PAST: a tenacious detective (Robert Mitchum) spinning his wheels to make good, a drop-dead beauty (Jane Greer) up to no good, and a m...

Directed by David Mamet • 1991 • United States
Starring Joe Mantegna, William H. Macy, Ving Rhames

In David Mamet’s cinema, nothing is as it seems—so you better know what you’re looking for. Unfortunately, the protagonist of Mamet’s nightmarish urban odyssey HOMICIDE, inner-city police detective...

Directed by John Cassavetes • 1976 • United States
Starring Ben Gazzara, Timothy Agoglia Carey, Seymour Cassel

John Cassavetes engages with film noir in his own inimitable style with THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE. Ben Gazzara brilliantly portrays a gentleman’s club owner, Cosmo Vitelli, desper...

Directed by Brian De Palma • 1984 • United States
Starring Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry

Brian DePalma weaves a sleekly stylish tale of seduction, mystery, and murder in the Hitchcock tradition. Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), an unemployed actor, is asked to house-sit a luxurious apar...

Directed by Stephen Frears • 1984 • United Kingdom
Starring Terence Stamp, John Hurt, Tim Roth

Terence Stamp is Willie, a gangster’s henchman turned “supergrass” (informer) trying to live in peaceful hiding in a remote Spanish village. Sun-dappled bliss turns to nerve-racking suspense, however, ...