Staff Picks
Noirvember: Film Noir Around The World
- Thomas M.
- Monday, November 14, 2022
Collection
Welcome to Noirvember! Can you feel the shadows growing around you? Film noir is a movie genre known for its cynical and existential characters and situations. You will often find corruption, organized crime, femme fatales, paranoia, and antiheroes, and the endings are rarely happy or just. Each entry on this list represents a take on film noir or has elements of noir, and comes from a different country. This sampling includes crime thrillers and murder mysteries alongside sci-fi and dreamlike elements. There are plenty more noir films to be found in the library's collection as well as streaming for free with your library card via Kanopy and Hoopla.
The American Friend
Published in 2016
A young picture framer thinks that he has terminal disease and is set up to become a hired assassin in West Germany because of the lure of quick money.
The Bad Sleep Well
Published in 2006
A young executive hunts down his father's killer. A tale about corruption in the boardrooms of postwar corporate Japan as seen through the rising executive eyes.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
Published in 2018
An American writer traveling in Rome is the only witness to an attempted murder by a sinister man in a raincoat and black leather gloves, though he is powerless to do anything to stop him. Learning that three other women have been murdered by this person and feeling that something is not quite right about the scene he has witnessed and the police's inability to make any progress, he launches his own personal investigation and nearly loses his life in the process.
Blade Runner
The Final Cut.
Published in 2010
Blade Runner returns in Ridley Scott's definitive Final Cut, including extended scenes and never-before-seen special effects. In a signature role as 21st century detective Rick Deckard, Harrison Ford brings his masculine yet vulnerable presence to this stylish noir thriller. In a future of high-tech possibility soured by urban and social decay, Deckard hunts for fugitive, murderous replicants and is drawn to a mystery woman whose secrets may undermine his soul.
Blade Runner the Final Cut
Published in 2012
Blade Runner returns in Ridley Scott's definitive Final Cut, including extended scenes and never-before-seen special effects. In a signature role as 21st century detective Rick Deckard, Harrison Ford brings his masculine yet vulnerable presence to this stylish noir thriller. In a future of high-tech possibility soured by urban and social decay, Deckard hunts for fugitive, murderous replicants and is drawn to a mystery woman whose secrets may undermine his soul.
Brighton Rock
Published in 2002
A teenage gangster commits a murder and marries a waitress to cover his tracks. He later decides to get rid of her, but fate takes a hand in his murder plot.
Department Q Trilogy
Published in 2016
Police inspector Carl Mørck and his assistant Assad investigate a cold case about a disappeared woman; when the murder of young twins implicates a group of students as the killers, Carl Mørck investigates; Department Q must catch a serial killer before time runs out.
Elevator to the Gallows
Published in 2006
Florence Carala and her lover Julien Tavernier, an ex-paratrooper, want to murder her husband by faking a suicide.
Elevator to the Gallows
Published in 2018
A self-assured businessman murders his employer, the husband of his mistress, which unintentionally provokes an ill-fated chain of events.
The Kid Detective
Published in 2021
A once-celebrated kid detective, now 32, continues to solve the same trivial mysteries between hangovers and bouts of self-pity. Until a naive client brings him his first 'adult' case, to find out who brutally murdered her boyfriend.
Long Day's Journey into Night
Published in 2019
A man returns to Kaili, Guizhou, the hometown from which he fled many years before. Back for his father's funeral, he recalls the death of an old friend, and searches for a lost love who continues to haunt him
Memories of Murder
Published in 2021
Based on the true story of a string of serial killings that rocked a rural community in the 1980s, a local officer reluctantly joins forces with a seasoned Seoul detective to investigate the crimes, leading each man on a wrenching, yearslong odyssey of failure and frustration that will drive him to the existential edge.
Memories of Murder.
Published in 2003
Based on the true story of a string of serial killings that rocked a rural community in the 1980s, a local officer reluctantly joins forces with a seasoned Seoul detective to investigate the crimes, leading each man on a wrenching, yearslong odyssey of failure and frustration that will drive him to the existential edge.