Working class anti-hero Midge moves from Chicago to LA, shits on just about everybody, including his new girlfriend and those that he meets in the corrupt and brutal world of professional boxing in which he makes his way. A public hero he may be, but the cost of success is his soul.

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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...

Eric Stanton is a man short on luck, but when he wanders into a small California town he finds something he really wants, waitress Stella, and with the unwitting help of sweet, wealthy June, he plans to have her. All would seem to be perfect until the woman of Eric's dreams is murdered, an event that rests control from his hands. The Fallen Angel is a fine example of the film noir, dark, claustrophobic and intense, with a brooding visual atmosphere that leaves you in little doubt that fate's a' find out more...

A classic noir adaptation of a Chandler novel with Dick Powell as the hardboiled, wise-cracking, incorruptible Marlowe in a seedy, decadent LA of shifting loyalties, unseen evil, phoneys, criminals, old money and family skeletons. Superb dialogue and definitive noir camerawork. find out more...

A seminal 1940s film noir about two brothers trapped in a world of mob corruption and realising too late their unavoidable doom. Force of Evil is a strikingly original example of the genre, dripping in atmosphere and conveying in every word and image a sense of dread. Both the director and the star were blacklisted by the McCarthyite witch-hunts, a situation that obviously influenced their work during the film. Superb. find out more...

Fritz Lang, one of the masters of the German expressionist cinema, turns his sinister imagination and shadowy techniques to a web like take of wartime espionage. Set in Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation, the film depicts an Eastern Europe populated by spies, traitors and revolutionaries, a deadly funhouse of political intrigue in which every personal encounter brings with it the threat of betrayal. Much of the nightmarish quality of Hangmen Also Die is attributable to playwright Bertolt find out more...

High Sierra follows a failed robber broken out of prison by an old associate, who takes part in a failed robbery in which a man is killed, and makes a getaway into the Sierra mountains for a final doomed stand. find out more...