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The Criterion Collection is not just a label — it is a position. Every release is an argument that this film matters, that it deserves the best available restoration, that the serious viewer needs to understand its context and history. For noir collectors, the Criterion catalogue is the essential foundation of any physical library. But with hundreds of releases and regular new additions, knowing where to start and what to prioritize is not obvious. This list makes that decision for you.
These are the ten Criterion noir releases that belong in every serious collection — selected on three criteria: the quality of the film, the quality of the restoration, and the value of what Criterion adds through supplemental materials. Some are canonical masterworks. One is here because it is the only way to see the film with its proper ending. All ten are worth every penny, especially on sale.
The essential buying strategy: Barnes and Noble runs Criterion 50% off sales approximately four times per year — typically January, spring, summer, and pre-Thanksgiving. Sign up for their email list. Make your list. Buy it all in one order during the sale. At half price, these releases are exceptional value. At full price, prioritize the titles where the Criterion restoration is the only clean presentation available.
The 10 Essential Criterion Noir Releases
#1 · Criterion Spine #627 · 1931 · Fritz Lang
M
New 4K digital restoration from the best surviving 35mm elements
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Official Criterion Blu-ray cover for M (1931) — the iconic shadow image.
Source: criterion.com press materials or the Criterion Blu-ray packaging.
Placement: Directly below the film title heading, left-aligned with text wrapping right.
Alt text: M 1931 Fritz Lang Criterion Collection Blu-ray spine 627
File name: m-1931-fritz-lang-criterion-collection-bluray.jpg
The single most important Criterion release for noir collectors, and the clearest argument for why physical media matters. M had circulated for decades in severely degraded public domain prints — murky, scratched, with audio so compromised that following the dialogue required real effort. The Criterion restoration is not an upgrade; it is a different experience. Fritz Lang's expressionist shadows, the deep-focus compositions, Peter Lorre's face — all of it was there in the original 1931 cinematography and none of it was visible in the prints most people had seen.
Peter Lorre's performance as Hans Beckert — the child murderer hunted by both the Berlin police and the criminal underworld — is one of the great performances in cinema history. It requires being seen clearly to be fully understood. The famous speech in which Beckert describes the compulsions that drive him, delivered at his trial before the gathered criminals, is a genuinely disturbing piece of acting even ninety years later.
The supplemental package is exceptional. Film scholar Anton Kaes provides a video essay that places the film in its historical context — Weimar Germany, the rise of the Nazi party, the social anxieties that Lang was channeling — that transforms a crime thriller into a document of its moment. An archival Fritz Lang interview, an audio commentary, and the booklet essay by Roger Ebert complete one of Criterion's finest packages.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 1.19:1 · Audio: LPCM Mono (German, with English subtitles)
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration from 35mm duplicate negative and print
Supplements: Video essay by Anton Kaes, audio commentary by Gunnar Decker, Fritz Lang interview (archival), theatrical trailer, booklet with essay by Roger Ebert
Why this and not a cheaper edition: M circulates widely in public domain releases that range from poor to terrible. The Criterion restoration is the only clean presentation of the film available. There is no substitute.
Essential: Buy at any price
#2 · Criterion Spine #1074 · 1950 · John Huston
The Asphalt Jungle
New 4K digital restoration from original 35mm elements
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Promotional still of the heist crew — Sterling Hayden, Sam Jaffe, and the ensemble gathered around the table planning the robbery. Available through official press sources.
Placement: Below film title, above specs.
Alt text: The Asphalt Jungle 1950 John Huston Criterion Blu-ray film noir heist
File name: asphalt-jungle-1950-criterion-bluray-film-noir.jpg
The original heist film. Every crew-of-specialists crime picture from The Italian Job to Reservoir Dogs to Ocean's Eleven owes something structural to John Huston's 1950 masterpiece, and the Criterion restoration presents it with the visual quality its influence demands. Harold Rosson's cinematography — deep shadows, precisely composed frames, a visual darkness that feels moral as much as atmospheric — has never looked better on home video.
The film's genius is that the plan works. The jewelry store is robbed exactly as Doc Riedenschneider designed. What destroys it is the people: human frailty, bad luck, a compulsion that cannot be suppressed. Sam Jaffe as Doc is one of noir's great tragic figures — a man of genuine intelligence and precision undone by the specific weakness that makes him human. A young Marilyn Monroe appears in a small role that the restoration makes impossible to overlook.
The supplemental package includes a documentary on the film's production and its foundational influence on the heist genre, a visual essay, and the original trailer. The booklet essay by Geoffrey O'Brien provides essential critical context.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 · Audio: LPCM Mono
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration from original MGM 35mm elements
Supplements: Documentary on production and legacy, visual essay on heist genre, original trailer, booklet essay by Geoffrey O'Brien
Why this and not a cheaper edition: Previous home video presentations of The Asphalt Jungle were acceptable but not definitive. The Criterion restoration is a clear step up and includes supplemental materials unavailable elsewhere.
Essential for any noir collection
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#3 · Criterion Spine #116 · 1984 · Coen Brothers
Blood Simple
4K digital restoration supervised by cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Criterion Blu-ray cover art or a promotional still of M. Emmet Walsh as Visser — the private detective, dramatically backlit, is one of the film's most distinctive images.
Placement: Below film title.
Alt text: Blood Simple 1984 Coen Brothers Criterion Collection Blu-ray
File name: blood-simple-1984-coen-brothers-criterion-bluray.jpg
The film that launched the Coen Brothers' career is also one of the most formally accomplished debut features in American cinema history. Blood Simple established every element of the Coens' mature style on the first attempt: the catastrophic gap between what characters believe is happening and what is actually happening, the precise and merciless consequence of every action, the landscape as moral commentary. Shot in Texas on a budget assembled from investors at screenings of a fake trailer, it looks and feels like the work of filmmakers who have made a dozen films before this one.
The Criterion release includes both the original 1984 theatrical cut and the 2000 director's cut, and the introduction the Coens provide to the director's cut — delivered entirely in the persona of "Mortimer Young, Film Historian," a deadpan academic figure who discusses the film as if he has no idea who made it — is one of the most entertaining supplemental features in the collection. It is both genuinely funny and a precise parody of the kind of reverent film scholarship that surrounds releases like this one.
Barry Sonnenfeld's cinematography, supervised by him in the restoration, reveals the film's visual design with exceptional clarity. The deep-focus compositions, the extreme close-ups, the expressionist use of darkness in the bar sequences — all of it benefits from the clean transfer.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 · Audio: LPCM Mono
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration supervised by Barry Sonnenfeld
Supplements: Both the 1984 theatrical cut and the 2000 director's cut, Coen Brothers introduction (as Mortimer Young, Film Historian), Q&A with the Coens and cast members, original trailer, booklet essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan
Why this and not a cheaper edition: The theatrical cut and director's cut together in one package, with the Mortimer Young introduction, make this the only version of Blood Simple worth owning. The restoration quality is exceptional.
Essential: The definitive presentation
#4 · Criterion Spine #592 · 1967 · Jean-Pierre Melville
Le Samourai
New 2K digital restoration (French with English subtitles)
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Promotional still of Alain Delon as Jef Costello — in the grey fedora and trench coat. One of cinema's most iconic images, widely available as a press still.
Placement: Below film title, right-aligned with text wrapping left.
Alt text: Le Samourai 1967 Alain Delon Jef Costello Criterion Blu-ray Jean-Pierre Melville
File name: le-samourai-1967-alain-delon-criterion-bluray.jpg
The most influential crime film not made in Hollywood. Alain Delon as Jef Costello — hitman, loner, a man who has reduced his existence to pure ritual — inspired John Woo's entire aesthetic, gave Jim Jarmusch the template for Ghost Dog, and sits behind every subsequent director who worked with a stoic, code-bound protagonist. The film is practically wordless; Melville communicates through gesture, color, and the precise choreography of space.
The Criterion restoration makes Melville's extraordinary color language visible in a way that inferior presentations obscure. The blue-grey of Jef's apartment versus the warmer, more dangerous tones of the city outside is a carefully constructed moral geography, and the transfer preserves it with exceptional fidelity.
The standout supplement is a video essay by Ginette Vincendeau, author of a monograph on Melville, that is one of the finest pieces of film criticism in the entire Criterion catalogue. Her analysis of the film's relationship to American genre cinema, Japanese samurai films, and French New Wave — all three at once — is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand what Melville was doing.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 · Audio: LPCM Mono (French with English subtitles)
Transfer: New 2K digital restoration
Supplements: Video essay by Ginette Vincendeau, archival Melville interview, theatrical trailer, booklet essay
Why this and not a cheaper edition: Vinedeau's essay alone justifies the purchase. The color restoration reveals a visual design that makes the film significantly more legible. Essential for any international noir collection.
Essential: One of the ten best Criterion releases
#5 · Criterion Collection · 1944 · Billy Wilder
Double Indemnity
New 4K digital restoration
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Official Criterion cover or a promotional still of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray — the ankle bracelet scene or the staircase image are the most recognizable.
Placement: Below film title.
Alt text: Double Indemnity 1944 Billy Wilder Barbara Stanwyck Fred MacMurray Criterion Blu-ray
File name: double-indemnity-1944-barbara-stanwyck-criterion-bluray.jpg
The definitive femme fatale film and one of the most precisely constructed pictures in the American canon. Walter Neff narrates the entire film into a dictaphone while bleeding out from a gunshot wound received earlier that evening. He knows how it ends before he tells you. Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler adapted James M. Cain's novel together and produced a screenplay so economical and so precisely observed — every line of dialogue doing two or three things simultaneously — that it remains a standard for the form.
Barbara Stanwyck as Phyllis Dietrichson is the template for every subsequent femme fatale. She does not seduce through passion — she seduces through suggestion, through implication, through letting Walter believe the scheme is his idea. John Seitz's Oscar-nominated cinematography renders the Los Angeles of 1944 in deep shadow and hard light, and the Criterion restoration presents it with a clarity that previous home video releases could not match.
The supplemental package includes an audio commentary by Wilder biographer Neil Sinyard, a documentary on the Production Code and the creative strategies used to circumvent it, and the booklet essay by crime fiction scholar Sarah Weinman on the film's literary sources and cultural context.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 1.37:1 · Audio: LPCM Mono
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration
Supplements: Audio commentary by Neil Sinyard, documentary on the Production Code, historian interviews, booklet essay by Sarah Weinman
Why this and not a cheaper edition: The Production Code documentary is essential context for understanding how Wilder made the film he made within the constraints he was working under. The restoration is the clearest presentation of Seitz's cinematography available.
Essential: The femme fatale film
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#6 · Criterion Spine #871 · 1955 · Robert Aldrich
Kiss Me Deadly
New 2K digital restoration — includes the restored original ending
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Criterion cover art or a still of Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer — the scene outside the beach house at the film's climax is visually striking and illustrates the restoration's quality.
Placement: Below film title.
Alt text: Kiss Me Deadly 1955 Robert Aldrich Ralph Meeker Criterion Blu-ray film noir
File name: kiss-me-deadly-1955-criterion-bluray-restored-ending.jpg
Kiss Me Deadly is the most formally radical film in the classic noir canon and this Criterion release is here for one specific, critical reason: it is the only home video edition that contains the film's original ending. The ending of Kiss Me Deadly — the beach house, the glowing box, what happens after Christina opens it — was cut from most theatrical prints and every home video release until Criterion restored it. The truncated version that circulated for decades changes the meaning of the film's climax significantly. You cannot fully understand what Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides were doing without seeing the complete film.
Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer is the least sympathetic private detective in the genre — brutal, self-interested, contemptuous of everyone around him. Aldrich adapted Mickey Spillane's novel and turned it into something genuinely strange and apocalyptic: a film about nuclear anxiety, about American masculinity, about the what's-in-the-box question as existential metaphor. Ernest Laszlo's cinematography is extraordinary — extreme angles, compressed spaces, a visual grammar that feels as unstable as the film's world.
The documentary included in the supplemental package covers the film's production history and its troubled exhibition history, including the story of how the ending was cut. Essential viewing to understand what Criterion has restored and why it matters.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 · Audio: LPCM Mono
Transfer: New 2K digital restoration
Supplements: Restored original ending, documentary on production and exhibition history, visual essay, theatrical trailer
Why this and not a cheaper edition: This is not optional. The Criterion edition is the only way to see Kiss Me Deadly as Aldrich intended it. Every other edition uses the truncated version. There is no substitute.
Essential: The only complete edition
#7 · Criterion Spine #1008 · 1953 · Samuel Fuller
Pickup on South Street
New 4K digital restoration
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Promotional still of Richard Widmark as Skip McCoy — ideally a close-up that shows the film's hard-boiled visual style. Or a still of Thelma Ritter as Moe Williams.
Placement: Below film title.
Alt text: Pickup on South Street 1953 Samuel Fuller Richard Widmark Criterion Blu-ray
File name: pickup-south-street-1953-criterion-bluray-samuel-fuller.jpg
Samuel Fuller's most formally inventive film and one of the most genuinely subversive pictures in classic Hollywood. Richard Widmark plays Skip McCoy, a pickpocket who accidentally steals microfilm from a communist spy courier. His response to discovering this is to try to sell it to the highest bidder. He does not care about communism. He does not care about democracy. He cares about money. Fuller made a film that wears the costume of Cold War patriotism while systematically undermining its values.
Thelma Ritter as Moe Williams — a stool pigeon who sells information to survive, who has been doing it so long she has already picked out her burial plot — gives one of the great supporting performances in noir history. Her single scene of genuine courage, late in the film, is the moral center of a movie that otherwise treats morality with cheerful contempt. She received an Academy Award nomination for this performance.
The Criterion release includes a video essay placing the film in the context of Fuller's career and the Cold War political landscape, and the restoration recovers the film from the degraded prints that had made it difficult to see clearly.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 · Audio: LPCM Mono
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration from original 20th Century Fox elements
Supplements: Video essay on Fuller and the film, additional Fuller-related material, trailer
Why this and not a cheaper edition: Pickup on South Street had been difficult to see in a clean presentation for decades. The Criterion restoration is the definitive home video edition and the context provided by the supplements is genuinely illuminating.
Highly Recommended: Essential Fuller
#8 · Criterion Spine #1094 · 2003 · Bong Joon-ho
Memories of Murder
New 4K digital restoration supervised by Bong Joon-ho
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Promotional still of Song Kang-ho as Detective Park — the final scene image, if available, is one of cinema's most haunting. Or any still from the muddy Korean countryside investigation scenes.
Placement: Below film title.
Alt text: Memories of Murder 2003 Bong Joon-ho Song Kang-ho Criterion Blu-ray
File name: memories-of-murder-2003-bong-joon-ho-criterion-bluray.jpg
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. Shot in 2003, it is a film that takes on additional weight knowing that the case it depicts remained unsolved for thirty-three years — until the killer was identified through DNA evidence in 2019, fourteen years after the film was released.
Two detectives with completely opposite methods — one intuitive and violent, one analytical and measured — investigate a series of murders of women in a rural Korean community in 1986. What Bong makes clear, gradually and without sentimentality, is that the case was not unsolved because the killer was too clever. It was unsolved because the institutions involved — underfunded, politically pressured, technologically limited — were not equipped to solve it. The film is a portrait of institutional failure as tragedy.
The Criterion supplemental package includes a new interview with Bong conducted after the real killer's identification. His response to learning who it was — what it means for the film he made about the case — is one of the most emotionally affecting filmmaker interviews in recent memory and alone justifies owning this edition.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 · Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (Korean with English subtitles)
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration supervised by Bong Joon-ho
Supplements: New interview with Bong Joon-ho (post-2019 identification), visual essay, theatrical trailer, booklet essay
Why this and not a cheaper edition: The new Bong interview — recorded after the 2019 identification of the real killer — is only available on this edition. The restoration supervised by Bong is the authoritative presentation.
Highly Recommended: The only complete edition
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#9 · Criterion Spine #1010 · 1970 · Elio Petri
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
New 4K digital restoration (Italian with English subtitles)
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Promotional still of Gian Maria Volontè as the Police Chief — in his uniform, with the expression of a man entirely certain of his own impunity.
Placement: Below film title.
Alt text: Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion 1970 Elio Petri Criterion Blu-ray
File name: investigation-citizen-above-suspicion-1970-criterion-bluray.jpg
An Italian police chief murders his mistress and personally conducts the investigation into her death, deliberately leaving evidence pointing to himself — testing whether his institutional authority will protect him from the consequences of his own crime. Elio Petri made a savage political satire disguised as a crime thriller, and the question the film asks — will the institution protect one of its own regardless of what he has done? — has a contemporary resonance that Petri could not have anticipated in 1970.
Gian Maria Volontè's performance as the Chief is one of the great pieces of acting in Italian cinema — a man simultaneously terrified and exhilarated by what he has done, who cannot stop testing the limits of his own impunity. Ennio Morricone's score is one of his strangest and most brilliant, a satirical distortion of triumphalist brass that turns the film's every institutional ceremony into a grotesque. The film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1971.
The Criterion restoration presents the film with exceptional color fidelity — Petri and cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller used color as moral commentary, and the restoration makes this visible for the first time on home video.
Format & Specs
Format: Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 · Audio: LPCM Mono (Italian with English subtitles)
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration
Supplements: Video essay, archival interview with Elio Petri, theatrical trailer, booklet essay
Why this and not a cheaper edition: This film had poor home video presentation for decades. The Criterion restoration is the first edition that does justice to Petri's visual design and Morricone's score.
Highly Recommended: Essential political noir
#10 · Criterion Collection · 1986 · David Lynch
Blue Velvet
New 4K digital restoration supervised by David Lynch · 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Image Suggestion & Instructions
Image: Promotional still of Kyle MacLachlan looking through the closet slats — one of the film's most iconic images and widely available as a press still. Or the Criterion cover art.
Placement: Below film title.
Alt text: Blue Velvet 1986 David Lynch Kyle MacLachlan Criterion 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
File name: blue-velvet-1986-david-lynch-criterion-4k-bluray.jpg
The film that established Lynch's mature vision and the neo-noir that most directly influenced the subsequent generation of American filmmakers interested in the darkness beneath suburban surfaces. A young man finds a severed ear in a field. He investigates. He finds something that cannot be put back. Frederick Elmes's cinematography — the idealized Eisenhower-era surfaces of Lumberton versus the near-darkness of Dorothy Vallens' apartment — is one of the great visual designs in American cinema.
This is Criterion's first 4K release of a Lynch film, supervised by Lynch himself, and the HDR presentation is exceptional. The sequences in Dorothy's apartment, shot in deep shadow with expressionist lighting, have a depth and intensity in 4K Dolby Vision that makes them feel genuinely dangerous — closer to the experience Lynch intended than any previous home video presentation.
The supplemental package includes new and archival interviews with Lynch, Dennis Hopper, and the cast, and a documentary on the film's production that covers the extraordinary creative circumstances — Lynch's rejection of studio safety, the improvisational quality of many scenes, Dennis Hopper's method preparation — that produced one of the most formally distinctive American films of the 1980s.
Format & Specs
Format: 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray · Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1
Audio: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 · HDR: Dolby Vision / HDR10
Transfer: New 4K digital restoration supervised by David Lynch
Supplements: New Lynch and cast interviews, production documentary, booklet essay by Kristine McKenna
Why this and not a cheaper edition: Lynch's personal supervision of the 4K restoration makes this the authoritative presentation. The Dolby Vision HDR is exceptional for a film that depends so heavily on contrast and shadow. The documentary is the most comprehensive account of the film's production available.
Essential: The finest available Lynch presentation
What to Buy Next: Beyond the Essential Ten
Once you own these ten releases, the next tier of Criterion noir worth adding to your collection includes Run Lola Run (Spine #878), Purple Noon (Criterion's gorgeous Alain Delon Ripley adaptation), Bob le Flambeur (Melville's earlier heist film, available in the Eclipse series), and the forthcoming additions that Criterion announces regularly on their website and social channels.
The Criterion Channel subscription is also worth considering alongside physical ownership — it allows you to preview titles before committing to the Blu-ray, and includes many films in the collection alongside titles not available on physical media. At roughly $11 per month, it pays for itself in prevented impulse purchases of films that turn out not to be for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many film noir titles are in the Criterion Collection?
The Criterion Collection includes dozens of noir and noir-adjacent titles across classic Hollywood, international cinema, and neo-noir. Key releases include M, The Asphalt Jungle, Blood Simple, Le Samourai, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, Pickup on South Street, and Blue Velvet, among many others.
What is the Criterion Collection spine number system?
The Criterion Collection assigns a sequential spine number to each release, starting from Spine #1. The number is printed on the spine of each physical release. Higher numbers indicate more recent releases. Spine numbers are a way for collectors to identify and track releases and spot gaps in their collection.
Are Criterion Blu-rays region-free?
Criterion Collection Blu-rays sold in North America are region A, which covers North America, Central America, South America, Japan, and South Korea. They are not globally region-free. European and Australian collectors should verify compatibility with their players before purchasing.
Does the Criterion Channel include all Criterion Blu-ray releases?
The Criterion Channel includes most but not all Criterion Collection releases. Some titles have streaming rights held by other platforms. The Channel is the best way to preview titles before committing to a physical purchase.
What is the best way to buy Criterion Blu-rays at a discount?
Barnes and Noble runs Criterion 50% off sales approximately four times per year. Sign up for their email list. One bulk order during a sale is the most efficient way to build a collection. Criterion's own website also runs periodic sales.
Is Kiss Me Deadly only available with its proper ending on Criterion?
Yes. The original theatrical ending of Kiss Me Deadly was cut from most prints for decades. The Criterion Collection is the only home video edition that restores this ending. All other editions use the truncated version, which changes the meaning of the film's climax.
Stream before you buy
Most of these releases are on the Criterion Channel. Watch there first, then own the Blu-ray of the ones that matter most to you.
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