Want to know the best Film Noir movies? How about the worst Film Noir movies? Curious about Film Noir’s box office grosses or which Film Noir movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Film Noir movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
What is Film Noir? One definition of film noir is….a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly such that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Film noir in French means black film. Before researching this page…we pretty much thought a film noir movie was a black and white, dark, crime movie. Well after researching these movies for the last couple of months we no longer have any idea what a film noir movie really is anymore.
Part of our research was finding and reading lots of film noir books and lots of internet lists that named the best film noir movies. We found Film Noir Guide by Michael F. Keaney. Encyclopedia of Film Noir by Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell, Dark Cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective by Jon Tuska and Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia b
So how did we come up with these 263 movies on the following table? First of all we picked one timeline…..1940-1959. Any movie labeled a film noir that was not made in those 19 years was excluded from our table. This rule pretty much destroyed many of the internet film noir lists. We actually found one internet list that only had 6 movies made before 1970 on their all-time film noir list. Next we created a excel spreadsheet. We used 11 different sources (books and internet resources). Once a movie was labeled a film noir movie in 5 different sources…it made our table.
Film Noir Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Film Noir movies by the stars or director of movie.
- Sort Film Noir movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Film Noir movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Film Noir movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Film Noir movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Film Noir movie won.
- Sort Film Noir movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score
And finally: This is obviously not every single film noir movie ever made. There are 1000s and 1000s of movies that many people consider film noir. We made 250 movies as our cut off point. Hopefully we have included the most popular film noir movies…though I am sure the good folks at the TCM message boards will find another 250 movies that need to be on the list. This was a request from Flora Breen Robison. Hey Flora….this was officially the most difficult requested page ever…but well worth the effort considering how supportive you are of our little old website.
So are you thinking….250 Film Noir movies is nice but I want more. Then check out this wonderful Film Noir page by the people at TheCinemaCafe.com. Plundering The Genre: Film Noir.
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The time line is too short….Malice should be included.
Hey Kevin…thinking about expanding the time line…or doing a 1960 to present day page.
Good to know. I need to see some again and some for the first time.
Glad it is of help….it was fun putting together.
A very good list, that keeps to the noir time table, a key feature of looking at noirs. If a list starts off with “Double Indemnity” as #1, you know it means business, even if it includes a number of genre crossovers and melodramas, widely accepted now in most noir discussions. ~
However, “My Favorite Brunette” with Bob Hope took a wrong turn…
I like your comment. I agree that My Favorite Brunette is far from the classic crime noir movies everybody thinks off ….but many people have put it into the comedy noir category. All of these different noir categories are new to me…as I had never heard of them before. Thanks for sharing some great thoughts.
Seriously now. Nobody puts Bob Hope, a comic, into noir, for a very simple reason: comedy is not noir. Some people have a very misguided notion of what noir even means. No such thing as comedy-noir. It’s a real laugher to suggest that. To them Moe beating up on Larry and Curley is noir. My suggestion is not to insult the great Bob Hope, by insinuating he’s noir. Noir is not everywhere.
I returned all the film noir books I was using…so I do not have the logic for why it was included…so that being said…My Favorite Brunette is no longer on the list. There were numerous movies that I did not think were film noir….but I went along with the film noir experts I was using as my references.
i know only a couple Sherlock Holmes & Charlie Chan films were shot in the Noir style and loosly could be included but that was not so much my point… Many times over the past years i’ve purchased “The (so called) Ultimate Collections, including true Noir films only to get home, pop them in and omg t
Hey Sandy….I agree. I have started adding even more film noir movies to the page. At this point I am starting to have some bad luck when it comes to finding box office information. Which Sherlock movies do you think were film noir. Some of the public domain movies are horrible when you put them in the DVD. It is like watching a classic movie on a UHF channel..those were the days
Good News, finally they are getting the best prints now available and enhancing them to the point you would think they were released yesterday ! so keep the faith and you will find them too !
That is indeed good news. I will be on the look out.
Where did the film noir infographic come from?
Not sure I understand the question
The graphic with silhouettes that charts the major characters/themes in a film noir. It seems like it’s been cropped, and I’d like to see the complete one. Is it from some other website?
The images came from the internet…under a film noir image search….the table is right from my access database. My database has over 26,000 movies researched and ranked. I think our pages have 9,000 movies listed in various pages.