a style of film-making developed in the 1940s, with a plot involving suspense, mystery, crime, and corruption, and a bleak, often shadowy, setting, or a film in this style
Film noir begins as the French appreciation of an American genre: the thriller or mystery film with a disillusioned or neurotic hero afraid of the world, the city, the night, and femmes fatales. It covers the period from the mid forties to the late fifties. But we now see Citizen Kane, some films by Marcel Carne, and some German pictures of the twenties as ‘noirish’ — David Thomson
[French film noir black film]