Top 30 Best Neo-Noir Films, Ranked for Filmmakers

This may be a polarizing start. 

There’s a lot of good to take out of Only God Forgives, even if it’s not right up your alley. Admittedly, it chooses a frustratingly-incoherent amount of style over a frustratingly-incoherent amount of substance.

It's one of the more dreamlike interpretations of the genre that still plays out by-the-numbers. That’s a good thing. 

From the deluge of red and blue lighting to the frames within the frames, to the picturesque cinematography of every last shot, it’s the quintessential experience to a fault.

Ryan Gosling was clearly on a streak after Drive, which solidified him as the modern film noir equivalent of a Scream Queen. This is an important entry in that filmography.

If the plot bewilders you and the pacing bores you, watch it for the classical motifs and haunting vibes that so blatantly permeate it.

When I said that neo-noir can heighten film noir, the first example I'd point to is Sin City. 

Adapted from Frank Miller's graphic novel, the movie preserves the black-and-white saturation. That immediately aligns it with the classic era of filmmaking.

It features hard-boiled male protagonists, fiendish murders, mystifying femme fatales, and poetic voiceovers — all trademarks of film noir. 

But it amps them up to 11. 

Characters survive an uncanny number of injuries. They all dress like caricatures. Accents of color violate the otherwise-grey setting. Then the film piles on some giant dinosaur statues and a yellow troll man.

Honestly, it's all super dumb. But that's the idea.

It's a heightening of film noir to literally “comical” levels.

MALTESE FALCON AT A HIGH SCHOOL

28. Brick (2005)

Rian Johnson’s debut is our first dose of a nontraditional noir setup. 

That is, rather than the grizzly streets of an urban underworld, Brick takes place at a high school. All the archetypes are there, they’re just adjusted to fit that new setting.

Besides the location change, Johnson keeps them all perfectly intact.

Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is as fast-talking and hard-boiled as any film noir protagonist — except acting that way in high school makes you the weird kid. 

When he discovers his ex-girlfriend has been murdered, he confronts it not as a real teenager would, but instead as a parodic sleuth. It’s funny, but it’s played so straight that you're invested in the mystery anyway.

SUBVERTING THE FEMME FATALE

27. Black Widow (1987)

One of the paradigm shifts from film noir movies to neo-noir movies is the addition of neon lights.

There’s still high contrast lighting, but directors now flood those once-monochromic images with vibrant reds, blues, and purples. With that, they replace the condemnation of immorality and temptation with a hedonistic embracement of them.

Enter the Void is the ultimate exercise in that. 

It's a drug trip, a sexcapade, and a DMT-fueled meditation on life and death. Much like Chinatown and Only God Forgives, this film appropriates the shimmer of its Asian influences. Then it employs a first-person POV to thrust you directly into and above the city of Tokyo.

Narratively, this is less about curing the depravity and more about reconciling its impact on people — in the most psychedelic way possible.

SETTING AND SENSITIVITY

22. Se7en (1995)

Let's return to form with Se7en, a linear detective thriller. 

Though it's more conventional than some of the other movies on here, its dreary atmosphere helps it stand out in the genre. 

The story takes place in I Don't Know Someplace, USA. Its actual name is less important than the city's tone, and that tone is overcast and bleak and threatening.

That does a lot of the legwork to define the film's overall mood. As we carry on, you'll see how the neo-noir movies that let their cities do the talking gain so much from it.

And the violence is just as implicit. The numeric gimmick — murders in the theme of the Seven Deadly Sins — makes each new kill inevitable and morbidly fascinating. 

By depicting them as graphic without cherishing the gore or glamorizing the action, Se7en keeps you from desensitivity. 

It builds to an ending that, rather than put you on the edge of your seat, makes you want to crawl into a hole.

BLAXPLOITATION MEETS NEO-NOIR

21. Jackie Brown (1997)

In one scene of this film, Max Cherry (Robert Forster) invites Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) to a bar. She asks him, "Is it dark?" He retorts, "Why's it have to be dark?" And that’s the question Jackie Brown answers.

It isn't overtly neo-noir, but contrast it with Sin City or Only God Forgives, which do all the noiry things in the noiry ways and come out weaker for it.

Quentin Tarantino crams the blaxploitation world into the neo-noir box and lets it overflow.

The would be femme fatale is a flight attendant under the thumb of the police. The shady deals are conducted in, not just a mall, but the BIGGEST mall. The typical jazzy musical motifs are gone, replaced with soulful interludes.

The cynicism hangs around, but here it's about the sociological castes that trap the character rather the psychological turmoil.

It fits the neo-noir definition to a tee, so why's it have to be dark?

PSYCHOLOGICAL NOIR

18. Memento (2000)

INTERNAL CONFLICT EXTERNALIZED

16. Heat (1995)

Heat is the first on-screen collision of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, two powerhouses in a crime drama — and that's awesome. 

But! Let's talk about Night Moves again.

Harry Moseby faced an internal conflict between his obligations as a husband and his obligations as a private investigator — two forces that he used to define his masculinity. 

Heat carries on down that path, pitting De Niro and Pacino against each other as two sides of the same coin, both facing Moseby's dilemma. One lawful, one chaotic, but neither strictly good or evil. 

Two men with obligations who have reconciled them in different ways. 

SUBVERTING THE TROPES

15. Fargo (1996)

You can take the noir out of the city, but you can't make it drink.

Wait, what?

Fargo stretches the limits of neo-noir, contradicting and subverting the genre in every discernible way it can while still unmistakably residing in the neighborhood. 

Where film noir loves a shadowy, urban underbelly, the Coen brothers opt for a snowy, rural town. 

Where film noir loves intricate mysteries, the Coen brothers pick incompetent mishaps. 

And, where film noir loves a cynical detective, the Coen brothers give us Frances freaking McDormand.

We behave as though the coastal elite cities are gatekeeping villainy, but ruthless killers can be found even in the most docile of middle-American towns. Fargo gives us "Darn tootin" and "Yah, you betcha" and "Whoa, daddy" and then it gives us the wood chipper scene. 

But that's the beauty and the confusion of neo-noir. It twists the tropes in the ways its parent genre wouldn't dare.

THE CYNICISM OF FILM NOIR

14. Thief (1981)

Michael Mann sure loves an emotional diner scene, doesn't he?

Most films on this list are set in New York or Los Angeles. Thief is set in Chicago. That bestows it with a reputable urban grit that's uncompromised by dreamy legend; it has neither the glamor of L.A. nor the grandeur of N.Y.C. So Frank's (James Caan) plight is as unromanticized as noir gets.

A master thief, Frank wants to give it all up for the simple life. In that renowned diner scene, he bares his soul to girlfriend Jessie (Tuesday Weld) and invites her to join him on his vanishing act.

It's touching and tragic and so obviously futile.

In the production of Thief, Mann went to great lengths to authenticate Frank's skill set. Caan even learned the techniques Frank uses in his trade. Yet, for all that realism, it’s hard to bite on this escape plan.

That's the dark cynicism of noir.

"It'll look like justice," Officer White (Russell Crowe) says to Sergeant Exley (Guy Pearce) after planting a gun on his victim. 

The plant validates White's shooting of an unarmed rapist — definitely justice, but not due process.

We've been touching on the theme of "good versus evil," often presented as an internal struggle within oneself or as an external struggle between cops and criminals. L.A. Confidential deals with three lawmen, each of whom is "good," or ostensibly on that side of the spectrum. 

But their definitions of justice and the ethics they follow to achieve it are questionable at best.

White is out for the blood of abusers. Exley is an unwavering boy scout who would check even his brothers in blue. And Sgt. Jack Vincennes just wants to make bubblegum celebrity arrests because it's sexy. 

Director Curtis Hanson distills James Ellroy's novel down to these three throughlines and lets them intersect in L.A.'s complicated ethical coordinate plane.

In their filmmaking debut, the Coen brothers immediately proved themselves innovators of neo-noir. 

Blood Simple is, as in the title, a simple and sleazy tale of simple and sleazy characters. Ethan and Joel shot it for cheap, but they didn't need special effects or numerous locations anyway. 

They knew that as long as they had sufficient character intrigue, suspense and wit, the film would work.

And those are like… their staples.

The film is complicated but not unintelligible. Without other budgetary distractions, the Coens can nail that and also showcase their patented dark humor in a way that twists the genre while remaining loyal to it. 

Plus — Frances freaking McDormand, man! 

This encapsulates the reactionary self-awareness that neo-noir can have. It also happens to be a great lesson for aspiring filmmakers on making something memorable without breaking the bank.

NEWSIES IN MODERN NOIR

11. Nightcrawler (2014)

It’s clear that dirt and decay are the requisites of a typical neo-noir city. 

But what happens when the city isn't actually spiraling into a dystopia? When the statistics are on the upswing?

When criminality is a rare animal? Nightcrawler answers those questions in one of the best modern noir films out there. 

Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a stringer so desperate to deliver on a bleeding scoop that he's willing to make the incision himself. 

See, in the era of instant news, noir is no longer just a game of cops and robbers. There are third parties watching and profiteering off every incident. And that's exactly Lou’s business. 

It's an apt critique of how modern news media vies for that Gotham City headline, regardless of accuracy. In doing so, they might become the criminal themselves — indirectly or otherwise.

EXPOSING THE GUTS OF NEO-NOIR

8. Mulholland Drive (2001)

HEADINESS IN NEO-NOIR

5. Point Blank (1967)

THE DECAY OF NEO-NOIR FILMS

4. Taxi Driver (1976)

Personally, I’m not a fan of Taxi Driver. 

But the qualities that puts me off to it are the same qualities that make its impact on the genre unquestionable. 

In Martin Scorsese’s take on film noir, the old lust for justice is subservient to the bureaucracy of politics. The hard-boiled antihero of the 1940s isn’t a smooth detective, he’s an awkward insomniac.

And the femme fatale isn’t some long-legged seductress, she’s a twelve-year-old prostitute. In short, society is in ruins.

And this isn’t even a fantasy film.

Almost all of the characters are unromantically flawed especially Travis, but they're just vehicles — pun intended — to drive us through the workings of the underbelly. 

Scorsese takes the time to milk the urban landscapes set to the tune of a smooth jazz interlude that's all at once beautiful, haunting, and grating.

We’ve studied plenty of moral quandaries here, but not nearly enough sexual taboos. Blue Velvet addresses that. 

While this genre is undoubtedly provocative, rarely is it overtly sexual. But the undertone is always there. 

Virginal student Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) finds a severed ear and brings it to the police. He takes a practically voyeuristic interest in the case, leading him astray to the suspect Dorothy's apartment. 

Like any good detective, Jeffrey eventually earns his Venetian blinds — but they’re from the slits in a closet door as he watches Dorothy undress.

In this film, the kisses are awkward and the sex scene is demonic. Like... there’s fire. Increasingly surreal expressions of gender appear, including an embodiment of male id who repeatedly screams “fuck” and calls Dorothy “Tits.”

And the town is called… anyway...

As Sandy (Laura Dern) wonders, it’s unclear if we’re watching a thriller about a detective or a pervert.

POSTMODERN NOIR

2. Pulp Fiction (1994)

Pulp Fiction doesn't shy away from its roots. They're right there in the title. Tarantino crafts a literary setting where his characters are meant to abide by the tropes, but they're all existentially unsettled by it. 

For instance, Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Samuel L. Jackson) are criminals who overthink the meaning of things to the point of introspective.

As we follow this unhinged mosaic of time, all the journeys stray from the natural order of things into some twisted territory. Characters who historically stand for power are emasculated. Criminals interpret their plot armor as divine intervention. And someone uses a damn sword.

Many people consider this film to be "postmodern." 

That's a label, it seems, that many films in the genre share. Particularly for directors like Tarantino, who hold Old Hollywood in high esteem, film noir was the modern standard and everything after that is made in its image.

THE BEST NEO-NOIR FILMS

1. Chinatown (1974)

Listen. 

I doubt you'll find ANY list of neo-noir films that doesn't end with Chinatown. I don't think it's because it is the best neo-noir of all time, bar none, we peaked in the 1970s, everyone goes home. And I don't think it's even because it has the most vocal fans. 

But Hollywood is about history.

This whole subgenre literally has "neo" in the title because it is intrinsically paying respect to its ancestors. So, if we're going to talk about influential films — even if your all-time favorite is Drive or Dark Knight or Fargo — you must leave a seat open at the table for Chinatown.

And that's easy to do because it IS a masterful film. 

It doesn't just riff on the noir formula. It updates it and recontextualizes. It resonates because it's a reminder that corruption and cynicism aren't just stylistic homages; they're oppressive systems ingrained into our lives, present even in the water we drink.

So forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.