Film Noir is a classic film genre that has provided a blueprint for many modern-day crime thrillers and mystery movies. Everything from Se7en to Prisoners and Drive owes much of their aesthetic and cinematic language to Hollywood's highly stylized genre that typically paints its pictures in stunning black-and-white photography and composes a grim picture of a corrupt society while exploring moral conflicts through characters caught up in a current of social upheaval.

Born out of a blend of American crime dramas, French poetic realism, and German Expressionist cinema, film noir began in 1940. It produced some of Hollywood's most enthralling movies until the late 1950s when Neo-Noir began to reinterpret and expand upon the genre's original conventions (and lead to such classics as Blade Runner and Mulholland Drive). For this list, we'll be sticking to the mid-20th-century films that adhered to the original ideals, creating some of the most atmospheric and gritty pictures ever made.