I love film noir, so I relish the chance to write about it and also to review some of the movies.

I am not one of those strict fans who insist that only movies from the period 1941-1958 can classify as noir (or perhaps 1940, now that Stranger on the Third Floor has been added to the canon), nor do I insist that the movie must be black and white and include a femme fatale and all the other defining criteria that so many noir fans get wound up about, so, for instance, I might include movies like Hitchcock’s Rope or Leave it to Heaven or Psycho or the 1931 version of M.

Having said that, I feel most of the really good stuff came out during that classic period, so there won’t be much outside of those dates.

I will include in this menu any blogs about noir which were originally published here as a Sunday Update, to prevent any essays that may be of interest to noir fans from becoming lost among the Archives.

Spoiler alert: if you haven’t watched any movie I discuss, you may want to wait until you’ve seen it before reading my review. Sorry, but I can’t see the point of reviewing a movie if you can’t talk about what happens in it, and that obviously must include the ending.