To Live and Die in L.A.
1985
Friedkin sun-drenched nightmare. The best car chase ever filmed and the most cynical ending in American crime cinema.
The Conversation
1974
Gene Hackman plays a surveillance expert who records something he should not have. Coppola made this between the two Godfather films.
Pulp Fiction
1994
Non-linear, funny, brutal. Tarantino changed how crime films could be structured.
Blood Simple
1984
The Coens debut. A Texas bar owner hires someone to kill his wife. Nobody does what they are supposed to do.
Blade Runner
1982
A cop hunts artificial humans in a dying future city. The best-looking film ever made.
Brother
2022
Clement Virgo made one of the best Canadian films in years about two brothers and what the street costs you.
Cape Fear
1962
Robert Mitchum as Max Cady is one of the great screen villains. The remake is louder but this one is meaner.
Dead Ringers
1988
Jeremy Irons plays identical twin gynecologists who share a psychic collapse. Cronenberg.
Road to Perdition
2002
Tom Hanks as a mob enforcer. Conrad Hall shot it. One of the most beautiful crime films ever made.
Run Lola Run
1998
Twenty minutes to save a life, three attempts. Tom Tykwer.
The Pope of Greenwich Village
1984
Mickey Rourke and Eric Roberts rob the mob. Geraldine Page takes the movie in one scene.
Pusher
1996
Refn made this for nothing in Copenhagen. A drug dealer has one week to pay back what he owes. Real dread.
The Terminator
1984
A machine from the future comes back to kill a woman before she can change history. Neo-noir with a robot.
The Vanishing
1988
Dutch. A man spends years trying to find out what happened to his girlfriend. The ending is the most disturbing thing in European cinema.
The Killer
1989
John Woo. Chow Yun-fat as a hitman. Shot composition as poetry.
The Departed
2006
A cop in the mob and a mob guy in the police. Scorsese. Everyone dies.
Mean Streets
1973
Scorsese before the budgets. Harvey Keitel holding it together while De Niro burns everything down.
No Country for Old Men
2007
Anton Chigurh is the genre distilled into one character. The Coens.
King of New York
1990
Christopher Walken gets out of prison and takes over New York in a fur coat. Abel Ferrara.
Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
1970
An Italian police chief murders his mistress and investigates himself. Elio Petri. Won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Eastern Promises
2007
Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen do Russian organized crime in London. The bathhouse scene.
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
1999
Jarmusch. Forest Whitaker as a hitman who follows the samurai code. RZA score.
Jackie Brown
1997
Tarantino most underrated film. Pam Grier. Robert Forster. Real affection for the characters.
Naked Lunch
1991
Cronenberg adapted the unadaptable Burroughs novel by making a film about a man writing the book. Peter Weller.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best neo-noir film?
To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) and The Conversation (1974) are the essential starting points for neo-noir. Chinatown (1974), Blood Simple (1984), and No Country for Old Men (2007) are also essential.
What makes a film neo-noir?
Neo-noir films share the themes and visual style of classic film noir — moral ambiguity, crime, darkness — but are set in the contemporary era rather than 1940s Hollywood. They often subvert or update the genre conventions.
Is Pulp Fiction a neo-noir film?
Yes. Pulp Fiction (1994) is widely considered a neo-noir film. It shares the crime setting, moral ambiguity, and fatalistic worldview of noir, presented through Tarantino's non-linear structure.