Bud Corliss, a handsome college boy is so obsessed with wealth that he'll do anything to get it. When his rich girlfriend Dorothy gets pregnant and is threatened with disinheritance, Bud stages her suicide, sending her plummeting from the roof of a high-rise. It's the perfect crime; until Dorothy's sister Ellen begins to unravel Bud's deadly scheme. A classic ‘hommefatale', that's still tense and creepy over half a century after its original release. find out more...

A gutsy 30s gangster noir with two 'hood boys whose paths into adulthood are a complete contrast; Cagney becoming a violent gangster and O'Brien a priest. O'Brien has to fight the local kids' hero-worship of Cagney, and this leads to an emotional and ambiguous climax. Tense, dramatic, well-acted with sharp dialogue. Astounding. find out more...

Franz and Arthur team up with an innocent young girl, Odile, and decide to plan a heist, but as the trio cruise the bars and cafes of Paris hatching the perfect crime it becomes apparent, in their less than professional approach, that everything may not go as smoothly as at first hoped. The Outsiders is a tongue-in-cheek homage to early American pulp crime flicks, fast paced and free spirited, Godard's film retains much of its freshness and excitement. find out more...

Fritz Lang's last Hollywood film is a savage indictment of the complacency of American justice. A writer is obsessed with the idea that an entirely innocent man could be sent to the chair - and he sets out to prove his theory when a showgirl is mysteriously found dead. A classic.

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Brilliant noirish adaptation of Graham Greene's gritty novel with Attenborough superb as the psychopathic Pinky, a small time gangster and violent hood, who marries a witness to one of his crimes to keep her quiet. Disturbingly good. find out more...

Based on a true story, the film begins in 1932 with the killing of a Chicago cop and the sentencing of two young men for his murder. Fast-forward eleven years, and the boss of the Chicago Times newspaper is intrigued to find an advert by the mother of one of the killers, Frank Wiecek, asking for information about the crime, clearly Wiecek's mother thinks her son is innocent. PJ O'Neal (Stewart), one of the Times' top reporters, is dispatched to find out whether Mrs Wiecek's opinion is clouded by find out more...

Bogart plays a man, convicted of murdering his wife, who escapes from prison in order to prove his innocence and, in trying to hide from the law, has undergone back-street cosmetic surgery. Even though he does not appear from behind his bandages until half way through the film that famous voice gives him away! Watch out for the superb use of first person camera work. A classic in every sense of the word. find out more...

Perhaps THE classic film noir, made in a studio in 6 days on a minimal budget. Fatalistic narrator Neal is hitching west to catch up with his girlfriend when his lift drops dead on him. Savage is superb as the femme fatale who blackmails him into a scam. A must for any student or lover of film noir. find out more...

Classic film noir. Frank Bigelow wakes up after a night on the tiles feeling the worse for wear. He soon discovers that he has, in fact, been poisoned and has only hours to live. And so he is plunged into an unfamiliar underworld and a desperate bid to find his own murderer. Superbly gripping. find out more...

The moody 28-year-old Mifune is the violent gangster whom boozy doctor Shimura diagnoses as suffering from TB ('a hole in the heart,' says the sour 'angel', ruefully). The movie breathes the polluted air of post-war pessimism, dissipation and poetic fatalism, symbolised in the shots of the oily, malaria-ridden swamp of a Tokyo dockside, but it is dramatically qualified by Mifune's suggested redeemability and Shimura's stoical humanism. Fascinating, highly enjoyable and filled with great scenes - find out more...