Vote on the next countdown (Oct. 2023)

1) Are they under seen by mofo? Probably not, definitely not in most cases because I found them because of mofo.

2) How in the world will these movies get multiple votes to create consensus.

Yes, the big problem with Film Noir is defining what we mean by that. The actual period is from the '40s until the early '50s or so. Which is a very rich, interesting movement and has hundreds of titles even though it is only twelvish or so years. For those of us who are Film Noir nuts that is more than enough to make a Top 50 for absolute sure but probably even a Top 100. However, getting more than thirty or so MoFos to make super deep dives into the Classic Noir period is basically not gonna happen.

Which means opening it up to Neo Noir so that we could get participation into the sixty-or-so mark that we had for say the Westerns list. But the problem there is while there is plenty of bickering among Noir enthusiasts and scholars about what is and isn't part of the classic canon, when it comes to Neo Noir it is open to much wider interpretation. So wide that it would be difficult to argue too much with somebody about what should or shouldn't count. If somebody says Chinatown and Night Moves (1975), obviously the answer is yes. If somebody else says Body Heat and Blade Runner, yeah, you can see it. But then when it becomes every thriller ever made and somebody wants to include three of the Fast and the Furious flicks on their ballot and The Human Centipede and Donnie Darko and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse it will so dilute the group list that to call it "Noir" of any kind is just ridiculous. And if voters can completely make up their own definition that means all of the cooler, obscure actual Film Noir from the '40s and '50s has absolutely zero chance of making it and being discovered - which to me would be the point of such an exercise. Even the acknowledged classics of the genre would fall well behind David Fincher and Christopher Nolan movies so that something that by all rights and by any objective metric should be obvious Top Ten material on a Film Noir list - Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, In a Lonely Place, The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing - would be well down the list if there at all.

So instead of Noir you could call it "Thrillers" or "Crime Films" or something else, but again, it becomes so broad that all of the usual suspects from the decade lists rise to the top and maybe you get a handful of actual, classic Film Noir. Maybe.