On Nov. 2, daylight saving time ends in America, and the clocks roll back an hour — but more importantly, on Nov. 1, horror streaming binge season officially ends, and noir streaming binge season begins. It’s time for the annual social-media event known as #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 dirty deeds done in darkness.
Distributors and local theaters are once again getting in on the action, from Criterion Channel’s November noir programming to Noirvember slates in repertory theaters around the country. But most of us are likely to celebrate Noirvember at home. Check out our 2023 and 2024 guides to the best classic noir, neo-noir, and lesser-known noir gems to stream this November, and if you’ve already watched all of those, here’s a new batch of Noirvember streaming recommendations.
The classics
Let’s start with a few seminal noirs, the basics you’ll want to hit to understand the genre and its conventions.
Shadow of a Doubt
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Where to watch: Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms
A modern version of this movie might pack the plot with “But wait, is he a murderer… or isn’t he?” twists and red herrings. But Hitch plays his noir classic straight: When charismatic Uncle Charlie (Citizen Kane’s Joseph Cotten) comes to visit his namesake Charlotte (Teresa Wright) and her family in California, evidence rapidly piles up suggesting that he’s a serial killer. The question is what young Charlie can do about it without ending up on his hit list — and without overplaying her suspicions before she’s absolutely positive. As usual, Hitchcock lets the audience know more than the characters, to enhance the tension and make it clear how much danger his vulnerable protagonist is in. And sharp performances from Wright and Cotten keep this cat-and-mouse game taut and creepy. —Tasha Robinson
Touch of Evil
Director: Orson Welles
Where to watch: Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms
More than a decade after making Citizen Kane, Orson Welles further secured his status as one of the greatest filmmakers ever by putting his stamp on the noir genre with Touch of Evil. Its plot and focus on racism and police corruption feel just as resonant today as they were in 1958, though the decision to cast Charlton Heston as Mexican special prosecutor Miguel Vargas hasn’t aged as well. Vargas is investigating an explosion on the U.S.-Mexico border, which puts him at odds with bigoted police captain Hank Quinlan (Welles), who has a history of planting evidence to get the results he wants. It’s a struggle of good versus evil where no one comes out unscathed.
The performances are excellent, with Heston offering his classic leading-man charm, Welles laying it on thick, and Janet Leigh playing Vargas’ tormented fiancée Susan — showing off the scream that became iconic when she starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho two years later. The camerawork is phenomenal, from the extended opening shot following Vargas and Susan crossing the border to the innovative way Wells filmed Heston driving. Touch of Evil’s mix of craft and sleaze embodies everything that makes film noir such a rich genre. —Samantha Nelson
The Killing
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Where to watch: Streaming on Tubi and Prime Video, or available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms
Before his 1960s work made him a bigger name, Stanley Kubrick made a punchy, wildly entertaining heist-driven noir about five guys conspiring to knock over a horse-racing track. Sterling Hayden plays ringleader Johnny Clay, who recruits a couple of racetrack employees (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Joe Sawyer), a crooked cop (Ted DeCorsia), and a money guy (Jay C. Flippen) to steal $2 million, in a scheme featuring a variety of unusual moving parts, including the assassination of a horse and the use of a pugnacious wrestler to start a brawling diversion.
Adapting Lionel White’s novel Clean Break, Kubrick collaborated with crime writer Jim Thompson, who handled the hard-boiled dialogue. Though the heist goes wrong, as they tend to do, the screenplay is particularly attuned to the human frailties that weaken a clever plan. The filmmakers find little notes of pulpy poignancy throughout, like one criminal’s sad husk of a marriage, or the sharpshooter who resorts to faking racism in order to brush off a friendly parking attendant. Kubrick went on to bigger and more ambitious projects — he never made a movie this short again. But minute for minute, The Killing remains one of his best films. It’s a thrill to see him apply his formal control to pulpy, unfussy material. —Jesse Hassenger
Next steps
Where to go after the basics? This is where noir fans’ mileage is going to vary most, based on which aspects of noir they like most. The mysteries? The fraught relationships? The twisty stories and unexpected reveals? Just the overall mood? Here are a few we’d recommend regardless of which subgenre you’re most into.
Phantom Lady
Director: Robert Siodmak
Where to watch: Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms
Director Robert Siodmak was an unsung master of noir variations, and he’s operating at his peak power with Phantom Lady, the rare 1940s noir with a female protagonist. It starts with a killer hook: Scott (Alan Curtis) has a fight with his wife, then spends the evening out with a mysterious woman, only to return home and find his wife murdered. Accused of the crime, he attempts to track down the mystery woman as his alibi for the time of death, only to find no trace of her. Worse, no one else they encountered later in the evening has any recollection of her existing, either.
Scott’s intrepid (and, yes, lovesick) secretary Carol, nicknamed Kansas (Ella Raines), becomes determined to investigate further and clear his name. Siodmak directs these sequences, like one where Kansas follows (and menaces) a potential witness through the streets and into a subway station, with such shadowy, expressive moodiness that the fogginess of the eventual solution doesn’t much matter; that’s almost part of the dreamlike atmosphere. Elisha Cook Jr., who also plays the henpecked conspirator in The Killing, has a particularly feverish scene as a jazz drummer whipped into a frenzy of lust. The whole movie makes New York feel like a city thrumming with unspeakable desires, as Raines plays a cross between plucky girl detective and obsessed stalker. —JH
Sweet Smell of Success
Director: Alexander Mackendrick
Where to watch: Streaming on Tubi and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and similar platforms
The glamorous, backstabbing world of the New York gossip columnist is the setting for this fantastic bitter little pill of a movie from 1957. Burt Lancaster plays against type as the imperiously cruel columnist J.J. Hunsecker, a hugely powerful media figure trying to break up his little sister’s relationship with a jazz guitarist. Tony Curtis (not playing against type) is the oily press agent acting as Hunsecker’s factotum and fixer in the hope of getting a leg up in this ruthless world of fame and blackmail.
Sweet Smell of Success’ plot wriggles like a snake as these two odious men make their maneuvers, but the movie retains an icy composure throughout. Mackendrick made some of the best British comedies ever during a long run at Ealing Studios, including The Ladykillers; for this, his American debut, he dipped his trademark wit and precision in poison, with impressively dark and cynical results. The dim and glittering diners and jazz clubs of the milieu are rendered in stunning, 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 classic. —Oli Welsh
Stray Dog
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Where to watch: Streaming on Plex and the Criterion Channel
Just before Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune began their ascent to samurai-cinema godhood with Rashomon in 1950, they made a few crime dramas together, including 1949’s Stray Dog, a sweat-drenched cop thriller set in the febrile atmosphere of post-war Tokyo during one hot summer. Mifune, just 29 at the time, already displays all his natural command and rangy fury as Murakami, a rookie detective who has his gun stolen. Humiliated and desperately worried about the harm it might cause, he begins a frenzied attempt to retrieve the weapon, following it into an underworld of poverty, desperation, and crime.
Kurosawa poured his love of American movies into all his work, and Stray Dog definitely has one eye on the great Hollywood noir and gangster films. It’s also an early example of the chalk-and-cheese buddy-cop movie, pairing the fiery, principled Mifune with another Kurosawa stalwart, Takashi Shimura, as an older, more pragmatic, laid-back detective. But without relinquishing the tension for a second, Kurosawa keeps his humanistic gaze locked firmly on Japanese culture and society. Like a lot of post-war crime fiction from Japan, Stray Dog is a fascinating window into a nation wrestling with its identity as it tries to rebuild. —OW
Deep cuts
Here are a few we recommend for noir fans who’ve seen everything else.
Crossfire
Director: Edward Dmytryk
Where to watch: Streaming on the Criterion Channel, or available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms.
The Criterion Channel included Crossfire in its November collection of “Blackout Noir,” featuring characters suffering from some form of memory blackout. In this case, the blackout applies to a group of servicemen whose night at a hotel bar ends with one of them dead. Sgt. Peter Keeley (Robert Mitchum) takes it upon himself to investigate, because he fears Corporal Mitchell (George Cooper), the drunkest of the lot, will be considered a prime suspect. Despite the groggy intrigue of its premise, Crossfire doesn’t have the same level of moral or literal shadows as some of its seedier cousins in the genre. In fact, by the end it’s downright upstanding, including a speech denouncing racial and religious prejudice in all its forms.
A case could be made that Crossfire is a social message drama with mystery elements; the movie even got major Oscar nominations for writing, directing, acting, and Best Picture, making it more of a prestige picture than other crime movies of the day. What lends the movie its noirish tones is the sense of ennui and confusion emanating from this group of soldiers, especially poor Mitchell, and the presence of hard-luck dame Ginny Tremaine (Gloria Grahame, Oscar-nominated for the role). By following servicemen adjusting to life Stateside in the years following World War II — even if only for a few evenings — Crossfire has thematic links to movies like The Best Years of Our Lives and The Master, only with a murder-mystery hook. (And a sensationalized finale, where shoddy policework is celebrated as clear justice.) As a result, it stands out from other Oscar movies and other noirs alike. —JH
Bedelia
Director: Lance Comfort
Where to watch: Streaming on YouTube as a public-domain movie and on the Internet Archive
Quaint on the surface, but with a wicked edge, 1946’s Bedelia is a kind of submerged noir — a brisk, mannerly British melodrama-mystery that’s slowly revealed to be a classically twisted tale about a femme fatale. Bedelia Carrington (Margaret Lockwood) is a newlywed, honeymooning in Monte Carlo with her husband Charlie, a wealthy businessman. She’s strangely shy about being photographed or painted, claiming she’s unphotogenic — which seems suspicious, since Lockwood is one of British film’s most luminous 1940s stars. The couple befriend a painter called Ben on the trip, but something’s up with the young man too; he’s secretly a detective with an intense interest in Bedelia’s past and her relationship with money.
Back at the Carringtons’ English mansion, Charlie falls suspiciously ill, and the movie becomes a sinuous power struggle between Bedelia, Ben, and Charlie’s business partner, Ellen. There’s no great mystery to what’s going on, but there’s something delicious and how slowly and implacably Bedelia tightens the screws on its anti-heroine without ruffling its polite surface, and Lockwood’s sympathetic performance keeps it from turning into a rote condemnation. —OW
Blast of Silence
Director: Allen Baron
Where to watch: Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms
A lot of classic noirs were shot mostly on soundstages, with location work becoming generally more viable in the years after the genre faded from prominence. By the early 1960s, sub-80-minute crime pictures weren’t as common, but writer-director-star Allen Baron took his shot with Blast of Silence, which includes a number of real New York City locations — apparently captured without a permit, per the film’s Noir Alley introduction on Turner Classic Movies, and in the spirit of the movie’s outsider criminal.
That technique alone makes Blast of Silence worthwhile, as it provides an accidental time capsule of mid-century, holiday-season New York where you can practically feel the sharp chill in the air. But Blast of Silence is also an evocative, sharp-edged character study in the vein of David Fincher’s The Killer, closely following hitman Frankie Bono (Baron) returning to his New York hometown for a job during Christmas week. He buys a gun, stalks his prey, revisits some old acquaintances, and provides a steady stream of disillusioned, depressive narration. Even if you don’t perform contract killings for a living, you may find the post-holiday ennui (and bittersweet memories) surprisingly relatable. This isn’t the only holiday-set noir — there are a surprising number of them even before the Shane Black years — but it’s easily one of the best. —JH
Neo-noir
Plenty of movies update the classic noir era, with an eye toward all the core conventions and the flavor that made it such a memorable genre in the first place. Here are some of the best and most high-fidelity neos.
Bound
Directors: Lana and Lilly Wachowski
Where to watch: Streaming on Kanopy, or available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms
The Wachowskis’ feature-film debut — the stylish thriller that led directly to them getting the backing for The Matrix — hits all the classic noir notes: a criminal underworld, a big score, a femme fatale with a supposedly sure-fire scheme, the patsy she lures into her web. The twist in this case, though — or at least, the first of many — is that the patsy is another woman: Corky (Gina Gershon, probably never better), who’s helpless putty in the hands of seductive Violet (Jennifer Tilly, definitely never better.)
The Wachowskis’ script lands one sharp twist after another, as Violet seduces Corky and solicits her help in ripping off Violet’s dangerous criminal boyfriend. The constant threat of violence and the obvious threat of a double-cross hang heavily over this openly erotic (and surprisingly graphic) queer take on a classic genre. But the real appeals turn out to be the smart, sexy dialogue and the stylish direction, with the added bonus of never being quite sure where it’s all going until the credits roll. —TR
The Actor
Director: Duke Johnson
Where to watch: Streaming on Hulu, or available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms
Proof that neo-noirs are still being made up to the present moment, The Actor slipped in and out of theaters in March 2025, though it’s based on a posthumously published novel that The Grifters’ Donald E. Westlake originally wrote in 1963. Paul (André Holland) feels trapped. He’s an out-of-work actor stranded somewhere in the American heartland with no money to his name and a nasty case of amnesia. Everyone in this town seems… off, except for one woman (Gemma Chan). They begin a relationship, but Paul still wonders about his old life, waiting for him somewhere in New York.
The first solo project from Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa directing partner Duke Johnson, The Actor has all the makings of a classic noir: a mystery, a jealous husband, a potential femme fatale. Johnson even shot the film in black and white to complete the homage. Those influences sometimes overwhelm what is admittedly a paper-thin plot, but for fans of the genre, The Actor is a modern classic. —Jake Kleinman
L.A. Confidential
Director: Curtis Hanson
Where to watch: Available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, and other digital platforms.
The Oscar-winning adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential probably would have won even more acclaim (and a lot more awards) if it hadn’t come out the same year as James Cameron’s Titanic. Set in 1953 Los Angeles, the movie embraces classic noir’s focus on corrupt cops. James Cromwell shows off his impressive range as Captain Dudley Smith, who’s looking to improve the LAPD’s image with high-profile busts led by sleazy Detective Sergeant Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) with the help of tips from tabloid reporter Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito).
The 1997 film provided breakout roles for Russell Crowe, as thuggish officer Bud White, and Guy Pierce, as ambitious Detective Lieutenant Edmund Exley. They’re the classic noir protagonists, digging into the truth behind a massacre, even though their bosses would like them to let it go. The plot is satisfyingly twisty, focused on flawed characters looking for a chance to be better. It’s a perfect sunshine noir, depicting the seductive promise of Hollywood and the rot that lies just below the surface. —SN
