# What is the best neo-noir movie of all time?

> Rain-soaked urban paranoia, morally compromised detectives, unreliable narrators, and dream-logic mysteries — the neo-noir canon spans five decades and several countries. Where do you stand?

*By YPB Team · Published June 3, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-neo-noir-movie-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Chinatown (1974)** — score 1000/1000
   Roman Polanski's definitive neo-noir — Jack Nicholson's private detective Jake Gittes unravels water-rights corruption and family horror in 1930s Los Angeles, ending in irreversible tragedy.
2. **Inherent Vice (2014)** — score 667/1000
   Paul Thomas Anderson's stoned, shaggy 1970 LA noir adapted from Thomas Pynchon's novel — Joaquin Phoenix's hippie detective stumbles through a conspiracy involving a missing real-estate mogul.
3. **Mulholland Drive (2001)** — score 667/1000
   David Lynch's dreamlike noir puzzle about an amnesiac woman and an aspiring actress in Hollywood, with its dazzling Silencio club sequence and a second-act inversion that reshuffles every earlier image.
4. **Seven (1995)** — score 600/1000
   David Fincher's rain-soaked serial-killer procedural following seven deadly-sin murders, building to one of cinema's most devastating final scenes in an empty field.
5. **Brick (2005)** — score 400/1000
   Rian Johnson's audacious debut transplanting hard-boiled Raymond Chandler archetypes into a California high school with entirely period-accurate 1940s dialogue, brilliantly self-assured.
6. **The Long Goodbye (1973)** — score 400/1000
   Robert Altman's shaggy, revisionist Philip Marlowe movie — Elliott Gould wandering 1970s Malibu as a man out of time — a deconstruction of the private-eye myth as meditation on obsolescence.
7. **Memento (2000)** — score 400/1000
   Christopher Nolan's backwards-told noir about a man with short-term memory loss investigating his wife's murder, using fragmented structure to put the audience inside his protagonist's subjective confusion.
8. **The Usual Suspects (1995)** — score 240/1000
   Bryan Singer's twisting heist thriller framed by a police interrogation of the seemingly harmless Verbal Kint, building to the famous unreliable-narrator revelation.
9. **Blade Runner 2049 (2017)** — score 240/1000
   Denis Villeneuve's ravishingly bleak sequel — K, a new blade runner, uncovers a secret that could destabilize what remains of society — a neo-noir meditation on consciousness and humanity.
10. **The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)** — score 1/1000
   The Coen Brothers' black-and-white 1940s California barber-turned-blackmailer story, a note-perfect pastiche of James M. Cain that uses noir's visual grammar to explore existential emptiness.
11. **L.A. Confidential (1997)** — score 1/1000
   Curtis Hanson's labyrinthine 1950s corruption thriller weaving three morally compromised LAPD officers through a web of prostitution, murder, and tabloid scandal.
12. **Blood Simple (1984)** — score 1/1000
   The Coen Brothers' brutal debut — a Texas bar owner hires a sleazy private eye to kill his wife and her lover — a series of cascading misunderstandings that become a masterclass in suspense.
13. **Blue Velvet (1986)** — score 1/1000
   David Lynch's surreal noir in which a college student discovers a severed ear in a field and is pulled into the sadomasochistic underworld beneath a peaceful American town.

Tags: movies, thriller, classics, crime