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 Arthur Penn • 1975 • United States
Starring Gene Hackman, Jennifer Warren, Edward Binns

Arthur Penn’s haunting neonoir reimagines the hard-boiled detective film for the disillusioned, paranoid 1970s. In one of his greatest performances, Gene Hackman oozes world-weary cynicism as a pr...

Directed by George Armitage • 1990 • United States
Starring Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Fred Ward

Based on the novel by crack crime writer Charles Willeford and produced by Jonathan Demme, this marvelously offbeat, black-comic caper features a totally unhinged performance from Alec Baldw...

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 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 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 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, ...

Directed by Takashi Nomura • 1967 • Japan
Starring Joe Shishido, Chitose Kobayashi

One of Japanese cinema’s supreme emulations of American noir, Takashi Nomura’s A COLT IS MY PASSPORT is a down-and-dirty but gorgeously photographed yakuza film starring Joe Shishido as a hard-boiled hit man caugh...

Directed by Masahiro Shinoda • 1964 • Japan
Starring Ryo Ikebe, Mariko Kaga

In this cool, seductive jewel of the Japanese New Wave, a yakuza, fresh out of prison, becomes entangled with a beautiful and enigmatic gambling addict; what at first seems a redemptive relationship ends up leading him f...