Here be those darkly vexing offerings one should include in their diet periodically. Film Noir (literally 'black film or cinema') was coined by French film critics (first by Frank Nino in 1946) who noticed the trend of how 'dark' and black the looks and themes were of many American crime and detective films released in France following the war. It was a style of black and white American films that first evolved in the 1940s, became prominent in the post-war era, and lasted in a classic "Golden Age" period until about 1965. With the list below Alice has included many "Contempory Noirs", making browsing that much more "coloured"..... Right: Orson Wells stars and directs "A Touch Of Evil".
Suffused with wry humour, Jean-Pierre Melville's 'Bob le Flambeur' melds the toughness of American gangster films with Gallic sophistication to lay th... Read more
AKA 'The Iron Kiss.' A reformed big city prostitute who tries to start again in a quiet town finds that beneath the little town's squeaky clean veneer... Read more
Set in 1949, Chris Cooper is Harry, a middle-aged businessman agonising over how best to leave his wife, Pat (Patricia Clarkson), so he can marry Kay... Read more
Gene Tierney received a Best Actress nomination for her depiction of a jealous woman unable to control her possessive instincts. This classic melodram... Read more
Joseph Cotten is pulp fiction writer Holly Matins, who arrives in Vienna to work for his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), only to be told that Lime h... Read more
A super version of HG Wells' fantasy, with Claude Rains playing the scientist who experiments with a drug which, while it makes him invisible, also tu... Read more
In 1939, the editor of the New York Daily Globe sends Haverstock, a crime reporter, into Europe in the hope of getting a fresh angle. Naive and wholly... Read more
Barbara Stanwyck gives a dynamic performance in this steamy psychodrama as the penned-up wife of a boring fishing boat captain whose yearning for exci... Read more
A noir-soaked drama based on a story, 'The Blank Wall', by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Joan Bennett stars as a mother who finds the body of her daughte... Read more
This noir classic tracks the rise and fall of con man/carnival worker Tyrone Power. Seducing side-show performer Joan Blondell to learn the secret of... Read more