From The Maltese Falcon to Chinatown to Drive. The genre that taught American cinema to make a shadow do the work of a paragraph.
Film noir is, depending on which film historian you ask, either a specific era (1940-1958, classical noir), a style (high-contrast chiaroscuro, voiceover, fatalism), or a mood (cynicism, sexual entanglement, moral compromise). What's not in dispute is its influence: almost every American crime film of the last fifty years owes the form something.
Our picks split into classical noir (1940s-50s) and neo-noir (1970s-present).
Classical noir ended around 1958 — the form's energy had been exhausted, the studio system was collapsing, and the cultural conditions that produced it (postwar trauma, the Cold War, the gendered domestic backlash of the 1950s) had shifted. The form was declared dead.
It was wrong. The 1970s neo-noir wave (Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, Night Moves, Body Heat in 1981) revived the form's energy with the difference that the new films could be more explicit, more morally complicated, and could acknowledge what the original noir's censorship-era films could only imply. The 1990s wave (LA Confidential, Mulholland Drive, the Coens' Miller's Crossing) added another generation. The 2010s wave (Drive, Nightcrawler, Inherent Vice) is the most-recent.
The form keeps returning because its central concern — what happens when a person's moral compromises catch up to them — never stops being relevant. As long as American cinema is interested in that question, noir is one of the answers.