The film noir that emerged from Hollywood in the years after World War II did not know it was film noir. Influenced by the moody, bleak visual style of German Expressionism—indeed, many noir directors were German émigrés who had fled the Nazi regime—crime thrillers like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Out of the Past were simply reflecting their time. The world had changed; America’s postwar hangover was cynical, fatalistic and morally ambiguous.
The heyday of these pictures stretched roughly from 1941 to 1958, after which time French film critics coined the term and codified the genre’s themes and traits. Neo-noir, by contrast, knows exactly what it is, a self-aware descendent, transplanting noir’s darkened soul to new eras, locales and cultures. The pessimism is still there, of course, albeit without the restrictions imposed by the old Production Code. Below are my selections for 15 of the best neo-noir.
15. Insomnia (1997, dir. Erik Skjoldbjærg)
No disrespect to Christopher Nolan’s English-language version of this Norwegian noir, but it’s the difference between a sledgehammer and a scalpel. Erik Skjoldbjærg’s debut picture is as sleek and cold as its Arctic setting. Stellan Skarsgård and Sverre Anker Ousdal play Jonas Engström and Erik Vik, a pair of police detectives sent to a remote town north of the Arctic Circle to investigate the murder of a 17-year-old girl. In a sting gone awry, Engström fatally shoots his partner by accident and tries to cover it up, letting the local authorities believe the girl’s killer must have shot Vik. As the lawman tormented by guilt and the area’s relentless daylight, Skarsgård is an exposed nerve paradoxically numbed by pain. Insomnia is shrouded in light, but its worldview is unremittingly dark.
14. Charley Varrick (1973, dir. Don Siegel)
Walter Matthau stars as Charley Varrick, an even-keeled, smooth-talking criminal who has the misfortune of masterminding a New Mexico bank robbery that quickly goes off the rails. A sheriff’s deputy disrupts the holdup, gunfire ensues, and Charley’s wife is killed in the melee before Charley and another gang member (Andrew Robinson) manage to get away. Their luck gets worse when they realize the $750,000 haul is mob money. Don Siegel’s direction is lean and gritty, a prime example of the unsentimental crime movie that thrived in the 1970s. Matthau, who won the BAFTA for Best Actor, effectively plays against type in a role that feels more suited for a Steve McQueen or Gene Hackman, and there are nifty appearances from Joe Don Baker and John Vernon—two terrific character actors who elevate every scene they enter. Charley Varrick resides in a cold, hard land of moral ambivalence; everyone has an angle, and no one can be trusted.
13. Le Samouraï (1967, dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)
Alain Delon’s Jef Costello is so cool as to cause frostbite. Clad in a trench coat and fedora, with a face as inscrutable as night, he says little and his expression says even less. Le Samouraï follows this French contract killer in the aftermath of a not-so-smooth hit job, and the results are as thrilling as they are laconic. Jef is an individual out of time, a hit man who abides by a code of conduct. The picture reflects Jean-Pierre Melville’s deep love for cinema, particularly American crime cinema of the 1940s and ‘50s, filtered through the spare aesthetic of Japanese samurai films. From the gleaming Citroëns on Parisian streets to the sleek glass and metal nightclub where Jef executes his victim, this is a movie that could be dreamt by a character in a movie, a lovely vision of artifice and atmosphere. Style is its content.
12. Body Heat (1981, dir. Lawrence Kasdan)
With its brew of sex, murder and fate in steamy Florida, Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat was pivotal in spurring a noir revival in the 1980s. William Hurt is Ned Racine, a skirt-chasing criminal defense attorney who meets and is immediately captivated by Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner), a husky-voiced, unhappily married sexpot. “You’re not too smart, are you? I like that in a man,” says Matty, a husky-voiced femme fatale who quickly understands that Ned is a guy figuratively—and, as demonstrated in a later scene, literally—led by his penis. It isn’t long before pillow talk turns to getting rid of Matty’s wealthy asshole of a husband, smarmily played by Richard Crenna. Kasdan said he wanted Body Heat to recapture movie eroticism. “The challenge of Body Heat was to make that love affair seem fresh and hot. All of the writing had been aimed at that—to come in on the sex scenes either before or after or right in the middle of them in such a way as to jolt the audience.” If the sex is bold, the plot is familiar to anyone who knows Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, but no matter. Like Ned, Body Heat is fueled by less cerebral fare.
11. To Live and Die in L.A. (1985, dir. William Friedkin)
Mainly remembered for a heart-stopping chase scene, To Live and Die in L.A. is so saturated in the look and sound of the 1980s, it’s easy to overlook how transgressive it is. Miami Vice was already becoming a television phenomenon for NBC when this neo-noir hit theaters, which might have dampened some of the film’s hyper-stylized allure. William Petersen is Richard Chance, a hotshot but reckless Secret Service agent determined to avenge the shooting death of his partner by counterfeit kingpin Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe). Chance will stop at nothing to collar Masters, even if that means committing armed robbery. Songs by Wang Chung (see what I mean about the ‘80s?) propel this sun-drenched thriller in a land where everyone is sleek, sexy and lives in modern-style beachfront houses. Oh, and that chase. Director William Friedkin, who already was responsible for one of the all-time car chases in The French Connection, tasked stunt coordinator Buddy Joe Hooker with choreographing a chase he hadn’t seen before. The result: Chance and his partner (John Pankow) barreling into oncoming traffic on the Terminal Island Freeway. Shot over six consecutive weekends and involving at least 75 vehicles, it is a showstopper in a movie that doesn’t even have first gear.
10. Heat (1995, dir. Michael Mann)
Heat earned its place in cinema history as the film where Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, two of American cinema’s finest actors, finally share screen time together. Michael Mann had the idea for Heat, which stemmed from police detectives he knew from his native Chicago, since 1979. De Niro is the criminal mastermind, Pacino the fiery Los Angeles police detective hot on his trail. Mann’s attention to detail permeates every frame. Its two centerpiece robberies are masterclasses in how to stage, shoot and edit action sequences. While the cast is formidable—it also includes Val Kilmer, Ashley Judd, Jon Voight and a host of reliable character actors—De Niro and Pacino are mesmerizing. On opposite sides of the law, both are consummate, calculating professionals whose personal relationships are victims of their obsession with work. As De Niro’s character, Neil McCauley, relates advice given to him during a stint in prison, “You wanna be making moves on the street, have no attachments, allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.” In Heat, men are what they do. Mann doesn’t condone McCauley, but he has grudging respect for him.
9. Jackie Brown (1997, dir. Quentin Tarantino)
Released three years after his groundbreaking Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino’s two-and-a-half-hour follow-up struck some critics as indulgent and sluggish. Even Tarantino’s agent told a Miramax exec after the premiere, “There’s the ultimate case for not giving the director final cut.” But Jackie Brown is one of QT’s most emotionally dense works, as soulful as the R&B songs that punctuate the soundtrack, brimming with gallows humor, film-geek references, showy set pieces and the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic dialogue. Most rewarding is the casting of B-picture icons Pam Grier and Robert Forster. Based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, the plot kicks into gear when Los Angeles baddie Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) whacks a would-be informant. A federal law enforcement sting and Ordell’s paranoia set in motion events that entangle Jackie Brown (Grier), a struggling flight attendant and money smuggler for Ordell. While Forster very nearly steals the picture as an aging bail bondsman, it is Grier, smart and sexy in the title role, who fully owns the film and makes it a compelling story of survivalism.
8. Blow Out (1981, dir. Brian De Palma)
Brian De Palma indulges all his favorite obsessions in Blow Out: voyeurism, suspense, dark humor, moviemaking, sex. No wonder, then, that it’s arguably his greatest achievement. John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a movie sound-effects designer. He is recording ambient sound one night when he hears a tire blow out, followed by a car plunging off a bridge into the river below. Jack is able to save the passenger, a prostitute played with doe-eyed vulnerability by Nancy Allen (then Mrs. Brian De Palma), but he cannot save the driver, who turns out to be the governor and a rumored future presidential candidate. Was this a tragic accident or something more nefarious? As is often the case with De Palma, Blow Out is rife with the ghosts of other pictures—Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (see #7) and anything you can name by Alfred Hitchcock—but such influences are distilled through his irresistibly sleazy, pop-culture aesthetic. What the picture finally delivers is far more devastating than its B-movie origins, leading to an ending that could be a case study in nihilism.
7. The Conversation (1974, dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
If ever there was a character who would need to receive his life lessons the hard way, it is Harry Caul. Portrayed by Gene Hackman, the taciturn, tightly coiled surveillance expert is a man of single-minded dedication and deliberate emotional detachment. But the walls he has built start to fray when he is assigned to surreptitiously record a conversation between a young couple (Cindy Williams and Frederick Forrest) in San Francisco’s Union Square. They sound scared. What is his client planning? Writer-director Francis Ford Coppola told Hackman that Harry should look like a “nudnik”—Yiddish for a dull, bothersome person—and the actor took it to heart. Hackman is extraordinary, as are supporting players John Cazale, Teri Garr, Allen Garfield, Harrison Ford and an uncredited Robert Duvall. Elegantly crafted, with an appropriately intricate sound design by Walter Murch, The Conversation examines the illusory power—and limitations of—a culture of surveillance and voyeurism.
6. L.A. Confidential (1997, dir. Curtis Hanson)
Curtis Hanson and co-writer Brian Helgeland spent two years paring down James Ellroy’s sprawling crime novel into a complex but compact, Oscar-winning screenplay. “Welcome to Los Angeles,” purrs sleazy tabloid writer Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito) in an opening voice-over that drops us into 1950s L.A., a seedy playground where the good guys and bad guys are all but indistinguishable. Our central characters are three flawed cops—Bud White (Russell Crowe), a brute; Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), ambitious and cocky; and Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), corrupted by his minor celebrity as an advisor on a Dragnet-style television show. In the aftermath of a massacre at a downtown diner, the trio are immersed in an underworld odyssey that entails Hudgens’ Hush-Hush magazine, a ring of call girls surgically cut to resemble movie starlets, and a gangland war. The cast is excellent across the board, particularly DeVito, James Cromwell and Kim Basinger, whose performance as a Veronica Lake-lookalike prostitute earned the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
5. No Country for Old Men (2007, dir. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)
Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel is a thick slab of mesquite-grilled nihilism with a dash of humor as dry as a West Texas dust storm. Josh Brolin is Llewelyn Moss, a stoic welder who finds $2 million in an abandoned case from a drug deal gone awry. Out to recover the loot, and kill a lot of people, is Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, a psychopath with a God-awful haircut and a terrifying way of deciding a coin toss. Tommy Lee Jones portrays a world-weary sheriff struggling to make sense of the trail of bodies being left in the wake. The three principals are extraordinary, but there are also excellent supporting turns by Woody Harrelson and Kelly Macdonald. No Country for Old Men netted the Coens Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. On that final recognition, the brothers perform a deft balancing act between fidelity to McCarthy’s prose and injecting their own unique worldview, including a memorable ending that is faithful to the book, until it isn’t. The Coens cannot resist moral ambiguity. In The Coen Brothers, Adam Nayman notes “the film is a study in how reverence does not preclude self-expression.”
4. Blue Velvet (1987, dir. David Lynch)
A suburban dad has a heart attack while watering his lawn. He topples to the ground and the camera burrows into the subterranean layers of earth until we land in a frenzied insect world, chaotic and cacophonous. That dichotomy between respectable suburbia and monstrosity simmering below the surface is the central metaphor of this David Lynch masterpiece. Blue Velvet then shifts to the stricken man’s son, guileless Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan), who is home from college to help take care of his father. On a stroll through the neighborhood, Jeffrey comes across a human ear, and the mystery it promises is something that he and his equally sweet-as-pie neighbor (Laura Dern) cannot resist investigating. If you have seen Blue Velvet, you know the sinister rabbit hole that follows, from Isabella Rossellini as a sultry torch singer to Dennis Hopper as the evilest sumbitch to ever don an oxygen mask. Lynch loves the dance between innocence and corruption. Blue Velvet might just be the cinematic apex of that thematic obsession, as vivid as a severed ear in a nice neighborhood.
(See more in The 10 best movies about voyeurism.)
3. The Long Goodbye (1973, dir. Robert Altman)
Robert Altman had the intriguing idea of transplanting Philip Marlowe, the hardboiled private detective created by Raymond Chandler, from the rain-swept streets of 1940s Los Angeles to the sun-flecked weirdness of 1970s La La Land. As the updated Marlowe, Elliott Gould finds himself reluctantly involved in a homicide case after giving a pal a lift to Mexico, only to learn afterward that his friend, Terry Lennox (former major-league pitcher Jim Bouton), is suspected of murdering his wife. Marlowe, convinced of Terry’s innocence, does some digging. From Gould’s idiosyncratic Marlowe—affable, rumpled, devoted to his demanding cat—to the playful variations of the theme music by John Williams and Johnny Mercer, The Long Goodbye is more about atmosphere than a conventional whodunit. Altman populates this peculiar world with California eccentrics—some threatening (filmmaker Mark Rydell as a vicious but devout Jewish gangster), some welcoming (half-naked, perpetually stoned yoga enthusiasts who live next door to Marlowe). Marlowe shrugs at it all with an “it’s OK with me.” But is it, really?
(See more in The 20 best hangout movies.)
2. Taxi Driver (1976, dir. Martin Scorsese)
“All the animals come out at night,” Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle tells us in voice-over. “Whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick, venal. Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” In Taxi Driver, Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader detail Travis’ descent into a personal purgatory without explanation. He is a Vietnam veteran and a racist. He is isolated, suffers from insomnia and, as he confides to another cabbie, harbors “some bad ideas” he cannot shake. Whatever propels this taxi driver toward an inevitable explosion of violence cannot be stopped. “Travis emerges as the enigmatic product of the various incoherences in the world around him,” John Belton writes in American Cinema American Culture. “The film captures the plight of the alienated individual in contemporary consumer society.” Travis tries to pull himself out through desperate attachments: first to Cybill Shepherd as a campaign worker he considers goodness incarnate, then to Jodie Foster as a 14-year-old prostitute he is determined to save. There is much to admire in Taxi Driver, from Scorsese’s arresting visuals to Bernard Herrmann’s incomparable score (his last), but this challenging film ultimately belongs to De Niro. Rarely has a film plunged so deeply into an individual’s capacity for rage.
1. Chinatown (1974, dir. Roman Polanski)
Set in 1930s Los Angeles, this stone-cold masterpiece marks the intersection where brilliant writing meets inspired direction. Robert Towne’s screenplay, long considered one of the all-time finest, snakes through a labyrinthine web of corruption and murder. Every stitch of Towne’s narrative has purpose and payoff—no wasted motion. Our guide through the neo-noir, much of it based loosely on one of L.A.’s earliest scandals, is gumshoe Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson, perfect). After being duped in what appears to be a ho-hum assignment of tailing a philandering husband, Gittes finds himself ensnared in a conspiracy involving a mysterious femme fatale (Faye Dunaway), her rich and sinister father (John Huston) and a lot of water in the middle of a drought. Director Roman Polanski, who has a memorable cameo as a knife-wielding nasty, builds suspense with surgical precision, forcing us to identify closely with Gittes. The director also had a major hand in the script, excising Gittes’ voice-over narration and crafting an ending that reflected a national zeitgeist beaten down by war and scandal. The result is an unforgettable movie—even if its final line urges you to do otherwise.
(See more in The 10 best conspiracy films.)
Honorable mention: The American Friend (1977, dir. Wim Wenders), Atlantic City (1980, dir. Louis Malle), Blood Simple (1984, dir. Joel Coen), Burning (2018, dir. Lee Chang-dong), Cutter’s Way (1981, dir. Ivan Passer), Decision to Leave (2022, dir. Park Chan-wook), Drive (2011, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn), Fallen Angels (1995, dir. Wong Kar-Wei), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973, dir. Peter Yates), Get Carter (1971, dir. Mike Hodges), The Last Seduction (1994, dir. John Dahl), Love Lies Bleeding (2024, dir. Rose Glass), Memento (2000, dir. Christopher Nolan), Mulholland Dr. (2001, dir. David Lynch), Nightcrawler (2014, dir. Dan Gilroy), Point Blank (1967, dir. John Boorman), One False Move (1992, dir. Carl Franklin), Tell No One (2006, dir. Guillaume Canet), Thief (1981, dir. Michael Mann), Zodiac (2007, dir. David Fincher)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 