On Nov. 2, daylight saving time ends in America, and the clocks roll again an hour — however extra importantly, on Nov. 1, horror streaming binge season formally ends, and noir streaming binge season begins. It’s time for the annual social-media occasion often called #Noirvember, when cinephiles take a break from demon possessions, endlessly reincarnating slashers, and classic monsters, in favor of moody lighting, hapless patsies, double-dealing dames, and soiled deeds achieved in darkness.
Distributors and native theaters are as soon as once more getting in on the motion, from Criterion Channel’s November noir programming to Noirvember slates in repertory theaters across the nation. However most of us are more likely to have fun Noirvember at house. Try our 2023 and 2024 guides to the most effective traditional noir, neo-noir, and lesser-known noir gems to stream this November, and should you’ve already watched all of these, right here’s a brand new batch of Noirvember streaming suggestions.
The classics
Let’s begin with just a few seminal noirs, the fundamentals you’ll need to hit to know the style and its conventions.
Shadow of a Doubt
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
The place to look at: Obtainable to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms
A contemporary model of this film would possibly pack the plot with “However wait, is he a assassin… or isn’t he?” twists and pink herrings. However Hitch performs his noir traditional straight: When charismatic Uncle Charlie (Citizen Kane’s Joseph Cotten) comes to go to his namesake Charlotte (Teresa Wright) and her household in California, proof quickly piles up suggesting that he’s a serial killer. The query is what younger Charlie can do about it with out ending up on his hit record — and with out overplaying her suspicions earlier than she’s completely constructive. As standard, Hitchcock lets the viewers know greater than the characters, to boost the strain and make it clear how a lot hazard his weak protagonist is in. And sharp performances from Wright and Cotten maintain this cat-and-mouse sport taut and creepy. —Tasha Robinson
Contact of Evil
Director: Orson Welles
The place to look at: Obtainable to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms
Greater than a decade after making Citizen Kane, Orson Welles additional secured his standing as one of many best filmmakers ever by placing his stamp on the noir style with Contact of Evil. Its plot and give attention to racism and police corruption really feel simply as resonant as we speak as they have been in 1958, although the choice to solid Charlton Heston as Mexican particular prosecutor Miguel Vargas hasn’t aged as effectively. Vargas is investigating an explosion on the U.S.-Mexico border, which places him at odds with bigoted police captain Hank Quinlan (Welles), who has a historical past of planting proof to get the outcomes he desires. It’s a battle of fine versus evil the place nobody comes out unscathed.
The performances are glorious, with Heston providing his traditional leading-man appeal, Welles laying it on thick, and Janet Leigh enjoying Vargas’ tormented fiancée Susan — displaying off the scream that grew to become iconic when she starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho two years later. The camerawork is phenomenal, from the prolonged opening shot following Vargas and Susan crossing the border to the progressive means Wells filmed Heston driving. Contact of Evil’s mixture of craft and sleaze embodies all the pieces that makes movie noir such a wealthy style. —Samantha Nelson
The Killing
Director: Stanley Kubrick
The place to look at: Streaming on Tubi and Prime Video, or accessible to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms
Earlier than his Sixties work made him an even bigger identify, Stanley Kubrick made a punchy, wildly entertaining heist-driven noir about 5 guys conspiring to knock over a horse-racing monitor. Sterling Hayden performs ringleader Johnny Clay, who recruits a few racetrack workers (Elisha Cook dinner, Jr. and Joe Sawyer), a crooked cop (Ted DeCorsia), and a cash man (Jay C. Flippen) to steal $2 million, in a scheme that includes quite a lot of uncommon shifting components, together with the assassination of a horse and the usage of a pugnacious wrestler to start out a brawling diversion.
Adapting Lionel White’s novel Clear Break, Kubrick collaborated with crime author Jim Thompson, who dealt with the hard-boiled dialogue. Although the heist goes incorrect, as they have a tendency to do, the screenplay is especially attuned to the human frailties that weaken a intelligent plan. The filmmakers discover little notes of pulpy poignancy all through, like one legal’s unhappy husk of a wedding, or the sharpshooter who resorts to faking racism as a way to brush off a pleasant parking attendant. Kubrick went on to greater and extra formidable tasks — he by no means made a film this quick once more. However minute for minute, The Killing stays one among his finest movies. It’s a thrill to see him apply his formal management to pulpy, unfussy materials. —Jesse Hassenger
Subsequent steps
The place to go after the fundamentals? That is the place noir followers’ mileage goes to range most, based mostly on which elements of noir they like most. The mysteries? The fraught relationships? The twisty tales and surprising reveals? Simply the general temper? Listed below are just a few we’d advocate no matter which subgenre you’re most into.
Phantom Woman
Director: Robert Siodmak
The place to look at: Obtainable to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms
Director Robert Siodmak was an unsung grasp of noir variations, and he’s working at his peak energy with Phantom Woman, the uncommon Forties noir with a feminine protagonist. It begins with a killer hook: Scott (Alan Curtis) has a battle along with his spouse, then spends the night out with a mysterious lady, solely to return house and discover his spouse murdered. Accused of the crime, he makes an attempt to trace down the thriller lady as his alibi for the time of loss of life, solely to seek out no hint of her. Worse, nobody else they encountered later within the night has any recollection of her current, both.
Scott’s intrepid (and, sure, lovesick) secretary Carol, nicknamed Kansas (Ella Raines), turns into decided to analyze additional and clear his identify. Siodmak directs these sequences, like one the place Kansas follows (and menaces) a possible witness by the streets and right into a subway station, with such shadowy, expressive moodiness that the fogginess of the eventual answer doesn’t a lot matter; that’s nearly a part of the dreamlike ambiance. Elisha Cook dinner Jr., who additionally performs the henpecked conspirator in The Killing, has a very feverish scene as a jazz drummer whipped right into a frenzy of lust. The entire film makes New York really feel like a metropolis thrumming with unspeakable wishes, as Raines performs a cross between plucky woman detective and obsessed stalker. —JH
Candy Odor of Success
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
The place to look at: Streaming on Tubi and accessible to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and related platforms
The glamorous, backstabbing world of the New York gossip columnist is the setting for this unbelievable bitter little capsule of a film from 1957. Burt Lancaster performs towards sort because the imperiously merciless columnist J.J. Hunsecker, a vastly highly effective media determine making an attempt to interrupt up his little sister’s relationship with a jazz guitarist. Tony Curtis (not enjoying towards sort) is the oily press agent appearing as Hunsecker’s factotum and fixer within the hope of getting a leg up on this ruthless world of fame and blackmail.
Candy Odor of Success’ plot wriggles like a snake as these two odious males make their maneuvers, however the film retains an icy composure all through. Mackendrick made a few of the finest British comedies ever throughout a long term at Ealing Studios, together with The Ladykillers; for this, his American debut, he dipped his trademark wit and precision in poison, with impressively darkish and cynical outcomes. The dim and glittering diners and jazz golf equipment of the milieu are rendered in beautiful, deep-focus, high-contrast cinematography by James Wong Howe, and the script by Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets is equally razor-sharp. A quietly savage traditional. —Oli Welsh
Stray Canine
Director: Akira Kurosawa
The place to look at: Streaming on Plex and the Criterion Channel
Simply earlier than Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune started their ascent to samurai-cinema godhood with Rashomon in 1950, they made just a few crime dramas collectively, together with 1949’s Stray Canine, a sweat-drenched cop thriller set within the febrile ambiance of post-war Tokyo throughout one sizzling summer season. Mifune, simply 29 on the time, already shows all his pure command and rangy fury as Murakami, a rookie detective who has his gun stolen. Humiliated and desperately fearful concerning the hurt it’d trigger, he begins a frenzied try and retrieve the weapon, following it into an underworld of poverty, desperation, and crime.
Kurosawa poured his love of American motion pictures into all his work, and Stray Canine undoubtedly has one eye on the nice Hollywood noir and gangster movies. It’s additionally an early instance of the chalk-and-cheese buddy-cop film, pairing the fiery, principled Mifune with one other Kurosawa stalwart, Takashi Shimura, as an older, extra pragmatic, laid-back detective. However with out relinquishing the strain for a second, Kurosawa retains his humanistic gaze locked firmly on Japanese tradition and society. Like numerous post-war crime fiction from Japan, Stray Canine is an interesting window right into a nation wrestling with its identification because it tries to rebuild. —OW
Deep cuts
Listed below are just a few we advocate for noir followers who’ve seen all the pieces else.
Crossfire
Director: Edward Dmytryk
The place to look at: Streaming on the Criterion Channel, or accessible to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms.
The Criterion Channel included Crossfire in its November assortment of “Blackout Noir,” that includes characters affected by some type of reminiscence blackout. On this case, the blackout applies to a bunch of servicemen whose evening at a lodge bar ends with one among them lifeless. Sgt. Peter Keeley (Robert Mitchum) takes it upon himself to analyze, as a result of he fears Corporal Mitchell (George Cooper), the drunkest of the lot, will likely be thought-about a major suspect. Regardless of the groggy intrigue of its premise, Crossfire doesn’t have the identical stage of ethical or literal shadows as a few of its seedier cousins within the style. In reality, by the top it’s downright upstanding, together with a speech denouncing racial and non secular prejudice in all its types.
A case may very well be made that Crossfire is a social message drama with thriller components; the film even obtained main Oscar nominations for writing, directing, appearing, and Greatest Image, making it extra of a status image than different crime motion pictures of the day. What lends the film its noirish tones is the sense of ennui and confusion emanating from this group of troopers, particularly poor Mitchell, and the presence of hard-luck dame Ginny Tremaine (Gloria Grahame, Oscar-nominated for the function). By following servicemen adjusting to life Stateside within the years following World Conflict II — even when just for just a few evenings — Crossfire has thematic hyperlinks to motion pictures like The Greatest Years of Our Lives and The Grasp, solely with a murder-mystery hook. (And a sensationalized finale, the place shoddy policework is well known as clear justice.) In consequence, it stands out from different Oscar motion pictures and different noirs alike. —JH
Bedelia
Director: Lance Consolation
The place to look at: Streaming on YouTube as a public-domain movie and on the Web Archive
Quaint on the floor, however with a depraved edge, 1946’s Bedelia is a form of submerged noir — a brisk, mannerly British melodrama-mystery that’s slowly revealed to be a classically twisted story a few femme fatale. Bedelia Carrington (Margaret Lockwood) is a newlywed, honeymooning in Monte Carlo along with her husband Charlie, a rich businessman. She’s surprisingly shy about being photographed or painted, claiming she’s unphotogenic — which appears suspicious, since Lockwood is one among British movie’s most luminous Forties stars. The couple befriend a painter referred to as Ben on the journey, however one thing’s up with the younger man too; he’s secretly a detective with an intense curiosity in Bedelia’s previous and her relationship with cash.
Again on the Carringtons’ English mansion, Charlie falls suspiciously in poor health, and the film turns into a sinuous energy battle between Bedelia, Ben, and Charlie’s enterprise associate, Ellen. There’s no nice thriller to what’s occurring, however there’s one thing scrumptious and the way slowly and implacably Bedelia tightens the screws on its anti-heroine with out ruffling its well mannered floor, and Lockwood’s sympathetic efficiency retains it from turning right into a rote condemnation. —OW
Blast of Silence
Director: Allen Baron
The place to look at: Obtainable to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms
A variety of traditional noirs have been shot totally on soundstages, with location work turning into typically extra viable within the years after the style light from prominence. By the early Sixties, sub-80-minute crime photos weren’t as frequent, however writer-director-star Allen Baron took his shot with Blast of Silence, which incorporates quite a lot of actual New York Metropolis places — apparently captured with no allow, per the movie’s Noir Alley introduction on Turner Basic Motion pictures, and within the spirit of the film’s outsider legal.
That method alone makes Blast of Silence worthwhile, because it offers an unintended time capsule of mid-century, holiday-season New York the place you possibly can virtually really feel the sharp chill within the air. However Blast of Silence can be an evocative, sharp-edged character examine within the vein of David Fincher’s The Killer, intently following hitman Frankie Bono (Baron) returning to his New York hometown for a job throughout Christmas week. He buys a gun, stalks his prey, revisits some previous acquaintances, and offers a gradual stream of disillusioned, depressive narration. Even should you don’t carry out contract killings for a residing, it’s possible you’ll discover the post-holiday ennui (and bittersweet reminiscences) surprisingly relatable. This isn’t the one holiday-set noir — there are a stunning variety of them even earlier than the Shane Black years — nevertheless it’s simply top-of-the-line. —JH
Neo-noir
Loads of motion pictures replace the traditional noir period, with a watch towards all of the core conventions and the flavour that made it such a memorable style within the first place. Listed below are a few of the finest and most high-fidelity neos.
Sure
Administrators: Lana and Lilly Wachowski
The place to look at: Streaming on Kanopy, or accessible to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms
The Wachowskis’ feature-film debut — the trendy thriller that led on to them getting the backing for The Matrix — hits all of the traditional noir notes: a legal underworld, a giant rating, a femme fatale with a supposedly sure-fire scheme, the patsy she lures into her net. The twist on this case, although — or at the very least, the primary of many — is that the patsy is one other lady: Corky (Gina Gershon, most likely by no means higher), who’s helpless putty within the fingers of seductive Violet (Jennifer Tilly, undoubtedly by no means higher.)
The Wachowskis’ script lands one sharp twist after one other, as Violet seduces Corky and solicits her assist in ripping off Violet’s harmful legal boyfriend. The fixed menace of violence and the apparent menace of a double-cross grasp closely over this brazenly erotic (and surprisingly graphic) queer tackle a traditional style. However the actual appeals transform the good, attractive dialogue and the trendy course, with the added bonus of by no means being fairly positive the place it’s all going till the credit roll. —TR
The Actor
Director: Duke Johnson
The place to look at: Streaming on Hulu, or accessible to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms
Proof that neo-noirs are nonetheless being made as much as the current second, The Actor slipped out and in of theaters in March 2025, although it’s based mostly on a posthumously revealed novel that The Grifters’ Donald E. Westlake initially wrote in 1963. Paul (André Holland) feels trapped. He’s an out-of-work actor stranded someplace within the American heartland with no cash to his identify and a nasty case of amnesia. Everybody on this city appears… off, apart from one lady (Gemma Chan). They start a relationship, however Paul nonetheless wonders about his previous life, ready for him someplace in New York.
The primary solo challenge from Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa directing associate Duke Johnson, The Actor has all of the makings of a traditional noir: a thriller, a jealous husband, a possible femme fatale. Johnson even shot the movie in black and white to finish the homage. These influences typically overwhelm what’s admittedly a paper-thin plot, however for followers of the style, The Actor is a contemporary traditional. —Jake Kleinman
L.A. Confidential
Director: Curtis Hanson
The place to look at: Obtainable to hire or purchase on Amazon, Apple, and different digital platforms.
The Oscar-winning adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential most likely would have gained much more acclaim (and much more awards) if it hadn’t come out the identical 12 months as James Cameron’s Titanic. Set in 1953 Los Angeles, the film embraces traditional noir’s give attention to corrupt cops. James Cromwell reveals off his spectacular vary as Captain Dudley Smith, who’s trying to enhance the LAPD’s picture with high-profile busts led by sleazy Detective Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) with the assistance of suggestions from tabloid reporter Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito).
The 1997 movie offered breakout roles for Russell Crowe, as thuggish officer Bud White, and Man Pierce, as formidable Detective Lieutenant Edmund Exley. They’re the traditional noir protagonists, digging into the reality behind a bloodbath, regardless that their bosses would really like them to let it go. The plot is satisfyingly twisty, centered on flawed characters on the lookout for an opportunity to be higher. It’s an ideal sunshine noir, depicting the seductive promise of Hollywood and the rot that lies slightly below the floor. —SN
