After the subsequent murder of a scared running girl he picked up on the highway Mickey Spillane's anti-hero, dodgy private eye Mike Hammer, smells money and follows the threads on a seedy trip through the LA underworld. find out more...

A dark, intriguing thriller. The enigmatic Laura becomes an object of obsession to a hard-bitten journalist and is found dead shortly before her wedding. As the mystery deepens with every twist and turn, the detective on the case also falls under the spell of the tragic beauty. Classic film noir. find out more...

Acclaimed and imitated, this is Clouzot's classic tale of the sadistic head-teacher who brutalises his unfortunate wife. With the help of her husband's mal-treated mistress, a willing accomplice, the two women set out to exact revenge. But when his body goes astray this macabre story truly unfolds... find out more...

Set against the backdrop of 1950s New York, "Motherless Brooklyn" follows Lionel Essrog (Norton), a lonely private detective afflicted with Tourette's Syndrome, as he ventures to solve his friend's murder. Armed only with a few clues and the powerful engine of his obsessive mind, Lionel unravels closely-guarded secrets that hold the fate of the whole city in the balance.

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James Ellroy's fictionalized tale of obsession, love, corruption, greed and depravity is set around the true story of the brutal murder of a fledgling Hollywood starlet that shocked and fascinated the nation in 1947. Two ex-pugilist cops, Lee Blanchard and Bucky Bleichert, are called to investigate the grizzly murder of ambitious silver-screen B-lister Betty Ann Short aka "The Black Dahlia", but the men's private lives keep colliding with their professional world and the more they investigate th find out more...

Returning home at the end of the war Johnny Morrison expects a warm welcome from his wife, but discovers that she's been unfaithful to him with dapper Eddie Harwood, the owner of the Blue Dahlia nightclub. After a heated and violent argument he storms out of their house and when, later the same night, she's murdered Johnny becomes the number one suspect. To clear himself, and unexpectedly aided and comforted by the estranged wife of the club's proprietor, he must find the real culprit. Will John find out more...

Burt Lancaster makes his debut, in this adaptation of a short story by Ernest Hemingway, as Swede, a washed-up boxer who finds himself manipulated and double crossed thanks to the charms of femme fatale Ava Gardner. A definitively noir gangster film about an unusual contract killing that stands out thanks to Lancaster's performance as the lovesick palooka taken for a ride.

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Orson Welles persuaded his then-wife Rita Hayworth to lose her trademark red hair for this convoluted murder mystery set on the high seas. Welles is an Irish sailor who accompanies Hayworth and her crippled husband on a sea cruise, only to become an unwitting pawn in a game of murder. Complex and compelling. find out more...

This is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all screen adaptations of Chandler's work. Altman in fact stays pretty close to the novel's basic narrative (though there are a couple of crucial changes), but where he comes up with something totally original is in his ironic updating of the story and characters: Gould's Marlowe is a laid-back, shambling slob who, despite his incessant claim that everything is 'OK with me,' actually harbours the same honourable ideals as C find out more...

Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis star in this murder mystery story about sex and betrayl. When a young girl goes missing private investigator Jill Fitzpatrick is hired to find the girl and her kidnappers. She meets Diana, the girl's English teacher and falls for her immediately. When the girl turns up dead, however, the case becomes more complicated and Jill gets more involved with Diana, all with terrible consequences. find out more...