Top 10 films noir

Inspired by this post on the intellectual history of commentary on noir films (how is that for meta?), here are my ten+ favorite films noir:

Classic Noir

• The Maltese Falcon (1941)
• Double Indemnity (1944)
• The Big Sleep (1946)
• The Third Man (1949)
• Sunset Blvd (1950)

Neo-noir

• Chinatown (1974)
• Blade Runner (1982)
• After Dark, My Sweet (1990)
• Pulp Fiction (1994)
• Fargo (1995)
• Memento (2000)

There are a lot of debates about what makes a film noir, and whether in fact it is a genre unto itself, or simply a style. My own sense of it is that noir began as a particular genre, growing out of interwar German expressionist filmmaking (M is often named as the originator of the genre), but evolved into a "style," that is a set of "noirish" elements -- including character types (grifters and conmen, cynical cops, private eyes, femmes fatales); stylistic points (urban nightscapes, rain or fetid heat, rotating fans, voice-overs); plot elements (heists gone wrong, adultery, double-crosses); settings and locations (from anonymous small towns and seedy hotels to Los Angeles and Central European cities) -- that can be introduced or remixed into any other genre. Thus it is possible to have "Sci-fi noir" (e.g. Blade Runner), "Western noir" (e.g., 3:10 to Yuma), "Comedy noir" (e.g. Fargo), "Horror noir" (e.g., The Brute Man), and so on.

Ultimately, what makes a film noir is less any of the above elements than a certain sensibility of what one might call alienated fatalism: a sense that the world as a whole is ultimately defined by corruption in every sense of that word (moral, financial, physical). Some critics have naturally chosen to label that attitude as a "cynical" but I would reject that; as always, the word "cynical" is just a scare word that foolish optimists use to malign realists. With that said, I should admit that my interest in deviant globalization is closely related to my predilection for film noir.