The Best Film Noir Movies
Shadows, fatalism and one composite score: the essential films noirs ranked across every major list that canonized them.
Taxi Driver (1976) leads with a composite score of 7.30.
- 1Taxi Driver1976 · Martin Scorsese7.30
Palme d'Or winner 1976 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1976 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1976
- 2Pulp Fiction1994 · Quentin Tarantino6.25
Palme d'Or winner 1994 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1994 · BAFTA Best Film nominee 1995
- 3Casablanca1942 · Michael Curtiz6.00
Oscar Best Picture winner 1943 · AFI 100 (2007) #3 · AFI 100 (1998) #2
- 4The Third Man1949 · Carol Reed5.46
BFI Top 100 British films #1 · Cannes Grand Prix winner 1949 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1952 #2
- 5No Country for Old Men2007 · Ethan Coen, Joel Coen5.03
Oscar Best Picture winner 2007 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2008 #1 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2008 #4
- 6Raging Bull1980 · Martin Scorsese4.37
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1980 · AFI 100 (2007) #4 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
- 7Sunset Boulevard1950 · Billy Wilder4.35
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1950 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1951 #2 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62
- 8The French Connection1971 · William Friedkin4.24
Oscar Best Picture winner 1971 · AFI 100 (2007) #93 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1972 #10
- 9Barton Fink1991 · Joel Coen, Ethan Coen3.89
Palme d'Or winner 1991 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1991 #3 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1992 #5
- 10The Lost Weekend1945 · Billy Wilder3.54
Oscar Best Picture winner 1945 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1948 #8 · National Film Registry (inducted 2011)
- 11Mulholland Drive2001 · David Lynch3.53
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2001 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #8 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #22
- 12The Departed2006 · Martin Scorsese3.52
Oscar Best Picture winner 2006 · Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 2006 #9 · Letterboxd Top 250 #117
- 13All the King's Men1950 · Robert Rossen3.23
Oscar Best Picture winner 1949 · National Film Registry (inducted 2001)
- 14Chinatown1974 · Roman Polanski3.16
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1974 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · AFI 100 (2007) #21
- 15
- 16Psycho1960 · Alfred Hitchcock2.87
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #31 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #46 · AFI 100 (2007) #14
- 17Double Indemnity1944 · Billy Wilder2.70
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1944 · AFI 100 (2007) #29 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #196
- 18L.A. Confidential1997 · Curtis Hanson2.26
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1998 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 1997 · National Film Registry (inducted 2015)
- 19
- 20The Maltese Falcon1941 · John Huston1.99
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1941 · AFI 100 (2007) #31 · AFI 100 (1998) #23
- 21Fargo1996 · Joel Coen, Ethan Coen1.93
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1996 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1996 #4 · AFI 100 (1998) #84
- 22The Night of the Hunter1955 · Charles Laughton1.91
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #25 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #41 · National Film Registry (inducted 1992)
- 23Mystic River2003 · Clint Eastwood1.90
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 2004 #1 · Oscar Best Picture nominee 2003
- 24Touch of Evil1958 · Orson Welles1.80
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1958 #1 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #108 · National Film Registry (inducted 1993)
- 25Blue Velvet1986 · David Lynch1.70
Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #72 · Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #85 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1987 #9
- 26Blade Runner1982 · Ridley Scott1.68
Sight & Sound 2022 critics' poll #54 · Sight & Sound 2022 directors' poll #62 · AFI 100 (2007) #97
- 27A Place in the Sun1951 · George Stevens1.65
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1951 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1952 #10 · AFI 100 (1998) #92
- 28High and Low1963 · Akira Kurosawa1.55
Kinema Junpo Best Ten (Japanese) 1963 #2 · Letterboxd Top 250 #6 · Scorsese's 39 essential foreign films
- 29Miller's Crossing1990 · Ethan Coen, Joel Coen1.29
Cahiers du Cinéma annual top 10 1991 #2 · Kinema Junpo Best Ten (International) 1991 #3 · Criterion Collection spine #1112
- 30Mildred Pierce1945 · Michael Curtiz1.29
Oscar Best Picture nominee 1945 · National Film Registry (inducted 1996) · Criterion Collection spine #860
A genre named in the rearview mirror
Film noir is unique among these pages: the people who made it didn't know they were making it. The term was coined by French critics in 1946 — Nino Frank, writing about a batch of wartime Hollywood thrillers that reached Paris all at once after the Occupation — and only became standard vocabulary decades later. What Hollywood thought it was producing were crime melodramas; what the French saw was a coherent dark style: German-expressionist lighting carried across the Atlantic by émigré directors and cinematographers, hard-boiled pulp fiction (Cain, Chandler, Hammett) supplying the fatalism, and wartime and postwar anxiety supplying the mood.
Double Indemnity (1944) is the form's perfect specimen and, for many historians, its true beginning: Billy Wilder directing, Raymond Chandler adapting James M. Cain, a murder plot narrated by a dead-man-walking into a dictaphone. Its seven Oscar nominations — and zero wins — established the genre's canonical pattern: noir was rarely rewarded in its own moment and almost always vindicated later, which is exactly the signature our composite score is built to catch. Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950) turned the noir apparatus on Hollywood itself, opening with a corpse narrating from a swimming pool; the Academy again flinched at the top prizes, and the polls have spent seventy years correcting that.
Exports and afterlives
The style traveled immediately. Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949) — Vienna's rubble, Orson Welles' late entrance, a zither score that became a global hit — is noir as European ruin-portrait, and the BFI has ranked it the greatest British film ever made. And when the classic cycle ended in the late 1950s, the genre simply changed tense: Chinatown (1974) is "neo-noir" only in the sense that its color cinematography is a technicality. Robert Towne's screenplay — routinely taught as the best ever written — relocates noir's fatalism from gangsters to municipal water politics, and its last line ("Forget it, Jake...") is the genre's worldview in five words.
Noir's canonical footprint keeps growing because its DNA propagates: neon-lit science fiction, Coen-brothers crime comedies, Korean revenge thrillers and prestige television all run on its circuitry. This page ranks the trunk of that family tree by accumulated canonical weight — the films every subsequent shadow traces back to.