Home › Best noir films on Amazon Prime.
Amazon Prime Video has the most inconsistent noir library of the major streaming services — films come and go with little warning — but at any given time it tends to have a strong selection of both classic noir and contemporary crime films available for free with Prime membership, alongside an excellent rental selection. These are the essential titles to look for.
The gold standard. The perfect neo-noir. The ending. Required viewing.
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Three LAPD detectives in 1950s Los Angeles — a political climber, a brutal enforcer, a tabloid celebrity — are drawn into a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of the department. Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger. Curtis Hanson made the best American crime film of the 1990s that nobody talks about in the context of Pulp Fiction.
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Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe. Lauren Bacall. Howard Hawks. The plot is famously incomprehensible — Hawks reportedly called Chandler to ask who killed one of the characters and Chandler did not know — but it does not matter. What matters is Bogart and Bacall and the pleasure of watching two people who are completely in sync with each other in scene after scene.
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See the beginner's guide. Billy Wilder. Barbara Stanwyck. Fred MacMurray bleeding out into a dictaphone. Essential.
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A woman arrives in Los Angeles with amnesia and meets an aspiring actress. David Lynch made the most formally disorienting Hollywood film of the 21st century — a film that switches protagonists midway through, that may be a dream, that certainly does not work according to any conventional narrative logic. The blue box. The diner at Winkie's. Club Silencio. Essential.
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Tony Scott directed Tarantino's script. A video store clerk and a call girl steal cocaine from her pimp and drive to Los Angeles to sell it. Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken in the scene of the decade. Gary Oldman as Drexl Spivey. Brad Pitt as a man getting very high. Clarence Worley's love for kung fu movies as a character motivation is pure Tarantino.
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Chinatown, L.A. Confidential, Double Indemnity, and Mulholland Drive are among the essential noir films regularly available on Amazon Prime.
Yes. Amazon Prime regularly has classic Hollywood noir available for rent, and some titles are included with Prime membership. L.A. Confidential and Double Indemnity are consistently available.