Examples of the genre are movies such as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, and Chinatown, as well as more current films like Blood Simple, Lost Highway, and L.A. Confidential.

"During the early 1940s through the late '50s, Hollywood studios cranked out some 300 film noir titles, so named because of their dark overtones and ever-lurking danger, heightened by shadowy-lit, grainy black & white film and sinister-sounding, minor-key soundtracks. Pulp fiction brought to the big screen, film noir was the collision of the gangster movie, the sordid crime melodrama, the thriller, the whodunit, and the gothic romance." --Rhino Records

"Film noir: a term coined by French critics to describe a type of film that is characterized by its dark, somber tone and cynical, pessimistic mood. Literally meaning 'dark (or 'black') film', the term is derived from roman noir, 'black novel', which was used by French critics of the 18th and 19th centuries to describe the British Gothic novel.

Specifically, film noir was coined to describe those Hollywood films of the 40s and 50s which portrayed the dark and gloomy underworld of crime and corruption, films whose heroes as well as villains are cynical, disillusioned, and other insecure loners, inextricably bound to the past and unsure or apathetic about the future."

-Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia

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