Home › Best noir of the 1980s.
Neon, paranoia, and some of the most visually distinctive crime films ever made. The 1980s were simultaneously the decade of Reagan's America — triumphalist, consumerist, morally simple — and a decade of extraordinary dark cinema that refused those simplicities. The films on this list are all, in different ways, about the costs that the decade's optimism obscured.
Friedkin's masterpiece. The car chase. The ending. The most cynical film in American crime cinema.
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The Coens figured out everything they needed on the first try. Nobody in this film knows as much as they think they know.
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Jeremy Irons plays identical twin gynecologists — Beverly and Elliot Mantle — who share everything including their patients and eventually their psychic collapse. The instruments for operating on mutant women. One of the most disturbing films ever made, disguised as a character study.
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The definitive sci-fi noir. A replicant hunter in a dying future Los Angeles. Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard. Rutger Hauer as Roy Batty in a performance that transcends the film it is in. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
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The Dutch film. Not the American remake. The ending is the most disturbing thing in European cinema and I will not describe it.
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A machine from the future hunts a woman across contemporary Los Angeles. Cameron made his best film first — a relentless, stripped-down sci-fi noir that refuses to slow down.
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A hitman accidentally blinds a singer during a job and tries to earn enough money for her surgery. John Woo at his most operatic. Shot composition as pure cinema.
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A teenager murders his girlfriend and shows the body to his friends. Nobody does anything. Crispin Glover gives an extraordinary, completely unhinged performance. Dennis Hopper with a sex doll. Keanu Reeves before any of that. A film about moral paralysis in suburban America.
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To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Blood Simple (1984), Blade Runner (1982), and Dead Ringers (1988) are the essential 1980s crime and noir films.
Yes. Blade Runner is a neo-noir that transplants the visual grammar of 1940s detective fiction — rain, shadows, moral ambiguity, a doomed protagonist — into a science fiction setting.