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The Criterion Collection has been releasing restored editions of important films since 1984, and its noir library is one of the deepest and most carefully curated in physical media. For a serious noir viewer, owning Criterion editions is not about status — it is about access to the best available restorations of films that often exist in poor-quality public domain versions elsewhere, combined with supplemental materials that genuinely deepen your understanding of what you are watching.
This list covers the essential Criterion noir releases, ranked by the combination of film quality, restoration quality, and supplemental value. Prices are approximate and vary. Criterion releases go on sale regularly — Barnes and Noble runs 50% off sales several times a year, and Criterion's own website runs sales periodically. Buy on sale whenever possible.
Buying tip: Barnes and Noble runs Criterion 50% off sales roughly four times per year. Sign up for their email list and buy your list in bulk during the sale. It is the best way to build a Criterion collection affordably.
Essential Criterion Noir Blu-rays
Essential Purchase · 1931 · Fritz Lang
M
Criterion Collection Spine #627
★★★★★
The foundational international noir and the release that most justifies the Criterion treatment. Fritz Lang's 1931 film about a child murderer hunted by the Berlin underworld had circulated for decades in severely degraded public domain prints — murky, scratched, with terrible audio. The Criterion restoration, sourced from the best surviving elements, is a revelation: the expressionist shadows that define the film's visual language are finally visible as Lang intended them, and Peter Lorre's performance benefits enormously from being able to see his face clearly.
M is not just a noir — it is the film that invented the procedural thriller, the psychological crime study, and the anti-hero all at once. Lang made it as the Nazis were rising to power in Germany, and the film's themes about mob justice, institutional failure, and the construction of criminality as an identity have never lost their relevance.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration ·
Extras: Video essay by film scholar Anton Kaes, audio commentary, Fritz Lang interview, theatrical trailer ·
Approx. price: $30-40
Essential Purchase · 1950 · John Huston
The Asphalt Jungle
Criterion Collection Spine #1074
★★★★
The original heist film. Every heist movie made since — The Italian Job, Heat, Reservoir Dogs, Ocean's Eleven — owes something structural to John Huston's 1950 masterpiece. A criminal mastermind assembles a crew of specialists to rob a jewelry store. The plan is perfect. The people executing it are not. Huston's film is the definitive statement of the heist genre's central thesis: it is never the plan that fails, it is human nature.
The Criterion release includes a young Marilyn Monroe in a small but unforgettable role, and Sam Jaffe as Doc Riedenschneider — the brains of the operation, undone by the specific frailty that makes him human. The supplemental package is exceptional, including a documentary on the film's production and a visual essay on its influence.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration ·
Extras: Documentary, visual essay, original trailer ·
Approx. price: $30-40
Essential Purchase · 1984 · Coen Brothers
Blood Simple
Criterion Collection Spine #116
★★★★
The Coens' debut film and the most important American crime film of the 1980s not called To Live and Die in L.A. Blood Simple established everything that would define the Coens' career: the catastrophic gap between what characters think is happening and what is actually happening, the precise and merciless consequence of every action, the West Texas landscape as moral territory. Nobody in this film knows as much as they think they know, and the consequences are catastrophic.
The Criterion release includes both the original 1984 theatrical cut and the 2000 director's cut with a new introduction from the Coens — delivered in the deadpan mock-academic persona of "Mortimer Young, Film Historian" — that is one of the funniest supplemental features in the collection. The 4K restoration is exceptional; cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld's work has never looked better.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: 4K digital restoration supervised by cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld ·
Extras: Both cuts of the film, Coen Brothers introduction, Q&A with the Coens and cast, trailer ·
Approx. price: $30-40
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Essential Purchase · 1967 · Jean-Pierre Melville
Le Samourai
Criterion Collection Spine #592
★★★★
Alain Delon as Jef Costello, a hitman who lives alone in a near-empty Paris apartment with a caged bird and an absolute private code of conduct. Melville stripped the crime film down to its barest elements — gesture, silence, ritual — and produced something close to pure cinema. Le Samourai influenced John Woo, Jim Jarmusch, Walter Hill, and the entire tradition of the stoic, code-following protagonist that extends through Ghost Dog and Drive to the present day.
The Criterion transfer makes Melville's extraordinary use of color — the blue-grey palette of Jef's apartment, the warm yellows of the city outside — visible in a way that inferior transfers do not. The supplemental materials include a video essay by film scholar Ginette Vincendeau that is one of the best pieces of film criticism in the Criterion catalogue.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 2K digital restoration ·
Extras: Video essay by Ginette Vincendeau, interview with Melville, theatrical trailer ·
Approx. price: $30-40
Essential Purchase · 1953 · Samuel Fuller
Pickup on South Street
Criterion Collection Spine #1008
★★★½
Samuel Fuller's most formally inventive film. Richard Widmark as Skip McCoy, a pickpocket who accidentally steals microfilm from a communist spy courier. He does not care about the microfilm, communism, or the fate of democracy. He cares about money and survival. Fuller made a film that is simultaneously a genuine noir thriller and a subversive critique of anti-communist paranoia — a film whose hero is explicitly motivated by self-interest rather than patriotism, and who the film treats as entirely correct about the relative value of those motivations.
Thelma Ritter gives one of the great supporting performances in noir history as Moe Williams, a stool pigeon who sells information to survive and whose single scene of genuine courage is the film's moral center. The Criterion restoration recovers the film from decades of poor-quality prints.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration ·
Extras: Video essay, Fuller interview, trailer ·
Approx. price: $30-40
Essential Purchase · 1955 · Robert Aldrich
Kiss Me Deadly
Criterion Collection Spine #871
★★★
Robert Aldrich's adaptation of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novel is the most formally radical film in the classic noir canon. Ralph Meeker as Hammer is the least sympathetic private detective in the genre — brutal, self-interested, contemptuous of everyone around him. The film builds toward an ending involving a mysterious box that is clearly a metaphor for nuclear annihilation. What's in the box? The great whatsit.
The Criterion release is significant for a specific reason: it restores the film's proper ending, which was cut from most prints for decades. Earlier home video releases used a truncated version that changed the meaning of the film's climax. The Criterion edition is the only way to see Kiss Me Deadly as Aldrich intended it.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 2K digital restoration ·
Extras: Restored original ending, documentary, visual essay, trailer ·
Approx. price: $30-40
Highly Recommended · 2003 · Bong Joon-ho
Memories of Murder
Criterion Collection Spine #1094
★★★★
Bong Joon-ho's film about South Korea's first known serial killer case received the Criterion treatment after Parasite's international breakthrough, and it is one of the most important additions to the collection in recent years. The restoration — supervised by Bong — recovers the film's extraordinary visual detail, particularly in its use of the rural Korean landscape as moral commentary.
The supplemental package is exceptional, including a new interview with Bong conducted after the real killer's 2019 identification — his response to the news, and what it means for the film he made about the case, is one of the most moving pieces of filmmaker interview in recent memory.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration supervised by Bong Joon-ho ·
Extras: New Bong interview, visual essay, trailer ·
Approx. price: $35-45
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Highly Recommended · 1972 · Peter Bogdanovich
The Last Picture Show
Criterion Collection Spine #72
★★★★
Not a conventional noir but a film suffused with noir's fatalism and moral vision. Bogdanovich's adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel about small-town Texas in 1951 is shot in black and white by Robert Surtees and examines the way desire, limited options, and social pressure converge to produce quiet catastrophe. Cybill Shepherd, Jeff Bridges, and Timothy Bottoms. Ben Johnson won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
The Criterion edition includes both the original theatrical cut and the director's cut, along with extensive documentation of the film's production and its relationship to McMurtry's source material. One of the great American films of the 1970s.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration ·
Extras: Both cuts, documentary, interviews, trailer ·
Approx. price: $35-45
Highly Recommended · 1970 · Elio Petri
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Criterion Collection Spine #1010
★★★★
An Italian police chief murders his mistress and personally runs the investigation into her murder, deliberately leaving evidence pointing to himself — testing whether his institutional authority will protect him from the consequences of his crime. The answer is yes. Elio Petri made a savage political satire disguised as a crime thriller, and Gian Maria Volontè's performance as the Chief is one of the great pieces of acting in Italian cinema. Ennio Morricone's score is one of his strangest and most brilliant. Won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration ·
Extras: Video essay, Petri interview, trailer ·
Approx. price: $30-40
Highly Recommended · 1998 · Tom Tykwer
Run Lola Run
Criterion Collection Spine #878
★★★★
Franka Potente as Lola, who has twenty minutes to get 100,000 marks to her boyfriend before he does something desperate. The same twenty minutes, three times, with different outcomes. Tom Tykwer made a film that uses its formal gimmick as genuine philosophical content — what is the role of chance versus character in determining outcomes? — and the energy and kinetic force of the film have not dated at all since 1998.
The Criterion release upgrades a film that was previously only available in mediocre DVD editions. The 4K restoration finally does justice to Tykwer and cinematographer Frank Griebe's distinctive visual approach.
Format: Blu-ray ·
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration supervised by director and cinematographer ·
Extras: Tykwer interview, visual essay, trailer ·
Approx. price: $30-40
Also in the Collection Worth Owning
Blue Velvet (1986) — Lynch's first major statement about darkness beneath American normalcy. The Criterion 4K restoration is the definitive presentation. Buy on Amazon →
Chinatown (1974) — Not yet in the Criterion Collection but available in a strong Paramount 4K edition. Essential regardless of label. Buy on Amazon →
Bob le Flambeur (1956) — Melville's aging gambler plans one last casino heist. The film that influenced the French New Wave. Criterion has this in their Eclipse series. Buy on Amazon →
Purple Noon (1960) — Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in the original adaptation. Mediterranean cinematography. Criterion's transfer is exceptional. Buy on Amazon →
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Criterion Collection have film noir?
Yes. Criterion has an extensive noir library including M, The Asphalt Jungle, Blood Simple, Le Samourai, Pickup on South Street, Kiss Me Deadly, and many more. It is one of the best sources for restored classic and neo-noir on physical media.
What is the best Criterion Collection Blu-ray for film noir?
M (1931), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Blood Simple (1984), and Le Samourai (1967) are the best Criterion noir releases in terms of film quality, restoration work, and supplemental value.
Is the Criterion Collection worth it for noir fans?
Yes. Criterion's restoration work on classic noir is unmatched, and their supplemental materials add significant context. For Kiss Me Deadly specifically, the Criterion edition is the only way to see the film's proper ending — earlier releases used a truncated version.
Where can I buy Criterion Collection Blu-rays?
Criterion Blu-rays are available directly from criterion.com, on Amazon, and at Barnes and Noble. Barnes and Noble runs 50% off Criterion sales several times a year — the best time to buy in bulk.
Does Criterion have a streaming service?
Yes. The Criterion Channel includes most of the collection's films and is available at criterionchannel.com for a monthly or annual subscription fee.