Tag: Film noir

  • The 15 best film noir

    Film noir didn’t know it was film noir. French critics coined the term after World War II to describe a cycle of American crime pictures steeped in shadow and cynicism, but the filmmakers themselves were simply reflecting a changed world. Drawing on the starkness of German Expressionism, the films traded in hard contrasts: light and…

  • The 15 best neo-noir films

    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 Lookout (2007)

    In trying to recreate a sensibility from a bygone era, modern-day film noirs can seem as stiff and artificial as Botox treatment, but not The Lookout. Veteran screenwriter Scott Frank, making an impressive directorial debut here, adheres to the tenets of the genre without it feeling like a hermetically sealed tribute. The psychologically hobbled hero,…