# 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?

*By YPB Team · Published April 8, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-noir-film-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

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.

Tags: movies, classics, crime, noir