This weekend I put out a call to my Twitter timeline for lists of ten films noir only, figuring that every film listed would carry with it definitionally an enthusiastic endorsement from that contributor. 64 ballots were received in all, some with only one or two films that respondents thought no one else would recommend.

For the purposes of putting the list together, I settled on an expansive definition of noir: while the classic era is considered to begin in the 1940s and some consider the period to end in 1958 with Touch of Evil and Vertigo, I included the few outlier films submitted from the 1930s and 1960s, while cutting off anything released after 1970. There were a number of responses that included neo-noirs (which in my definition is a distinct genre using select signifiers of the classic noir period and a different animal altogether) plus more that I wouldn’t even call that. Since in total they were outliers, and not wanting to wade further into a tedious classification argument, I discarded them. Some respondents included Indian cinema and the French poetic realist movement acknowledged as a chief influence on American noir, these were included as well, and taken together place the movement in a limited global context.