Like the ink on those yellow hard-boiled pages, film noir was a smeared affair ... And while by the time of 1958’s Touch of Evil noir was a shrewdly self-aware conceit, it’s worth going ...

The phrase “film noir” often calls to mind the image of a fedora-clad sleuth investigating a perplexing crime that may or may not involve the woman he loves in a shadow-swarmed city in the 1940s.

We search for the noir movies that everyone should see at least once, from Sunset Boulevard to The Maltese Falcon.