What is the best noir film of all time?

From the femmes fatales and shadowy streets of classic Hollywood to neo-noir reinventions in neon and rain, these films define atmosphere, moral ambiguity, and doomed fate. Which one casts the longest shadow?

1

Double Indemnity

Billy Wilder's 1944 masterpiece of femme fatale plotting and murder insurance fraud set the template for film noir forever.

2

Chinatown

Roman Polanski's 1974 neo-noir masterpiece with Jack Nicholson as a private detective uncovering a labyrinthine conspiracy in 1930s Los Angeles.

3

The Maltese Falcon

Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade hunts a precious statuette while navigating a web of lies and double-crosses in John Huston's 1941 classic.

4

Sunset Boulevard

A faded silent film star descends into delusion while a struggling screenwriter becomes her prisoner in Billy Wilder's 1950 Hollywood dissection.

5

Out of the Past

Robert Mitchum is a retired private eye dragged back into his criminal past by a dangerous woman in this 1947 pinnacle of noir style.

6

The Big Sleep

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall sizzle in Howard Hawks' 1946 Raymond Chandler adaptation — notoriously convoluted, irreplaceably atmospheric.

7

Vertigo

Hitchcock's 1958 psychological masterpiece about a detective's obsession with a mysterious woman is as mesmerizing as its title suggests.

8

Touch of Evil

Orson Welles' 1958 border-town noir opens with one of cinema's most celebrated long takes and never lets up.

9

L.A. Confidential

Curtis Hanson's 1997 neo-noir set in 1950s Hollywood follows three very different LAPD detectives whose investigations collide spectacularly.

10

The Third Man

Carol Reed's 1949 post-war Vienna thriller features Orson Welles in one of cinema's most iconic late entrances and a legendary zither score.

11

Blue Velvet

David Lynch's 1986 fever dream exposes the dark underbelly beneath a small town's picket-fence surface through a severed human ear.

12

Se7en

David Fincher's 1995 procedural thriller follows two detectives hunting a serial killer whose crimes embody the seven deadly sins.

13

Mulholland Drive

David Lynch's 2001 dreamlike neo-noir follows an aspiring actress and an amnesiac woman through a fractured mystery in Hollywood.

14

Memento

Christopher Nolan's 2000 reverse-chronology thriller follows a man with no short-term memory hunting his wife's killer — a landmark in noir storytelling.

15

Drive

Ryan Gosling plays a stoic Hollywood stunt driver moonlighting as a getaway driver in Nicolas Winding Refn's 2011 neon-soaked neo-noir.

16

Brick

Rian Johnson's 2005 debut transplants hard-boiled noir detective fiction into a Southern California high school — startlingly effective.