Noirvember 2025: The 7 Best Film Noir Classics To Stream This Across Across Netflix, HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, and More

It’s not often that a mere movie critic can somehow create a genuine holiday, but that’s exactly what happened when writer Marya E. Gates coined “Noirvember” over a decade ago, initially as a hashtag. The tag was flagging posts about marathoning film noir movies — mysteries, detective yarns, crime pictures, and other assorted tours of dark city streets, popularized in the 1940s — during the month of November. Eventually, it became a cinephile standard, perhaps as a helpful transition between the horror nights of October and holiday-themed events of December. Noir isn’t The Nightmare Before Christmas, exactly, but it uses some horror-movie style expressiveness to luxuriate in feelings of cynicism, doom, and paranoia. Sounds holiday-appropriate to me.

As a result of this new standard, plenty of streaming services stock up on classic noirs from the 1940s and 1950s for November, with the Criterion Channel leading the way. Granted, some services less interested in catalog titles would barely seem to know a noir if it hit them like a Brick in the face. But thanks to noir’s influence on erotic thrillers, slasher films, modern mysteries, and so many other subgenres, you can still find at least one noirish movie per streamer (and in some cases, many more than that). Here are picks for the best on noir on every major streaming service to get you started.

1. An affiliation with Turner Classic Movies keeps HBO Max more stocked than most services in classic cinema (though if you still have cable, the TCM app is even better in this regard). Film noir mainstay Robert Mitchum stars in this genre standard about a former private eye attempting to live a quiet life running a gas station, only to be pulled back into a world of crime and deception. Director Jacques Tourneur worked in early horror movies like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, and brings that atmospheric, sometimes dreamlike style to this movie’s black-and-white cinematography. A young (well, younger) Kirk Douglas also appears alongside Mitchum.

   Stream Out of the Past on HBO Max

2. Now that Prime has integrated its Freevee material with its own ad-supported streaming options, it has a number of canon noirs available if you can handle some ad breaks. The Third Man is another top-tier noir mainstay, also known for its distinctive style, specifically the way director Carol Reed was influenced by German expressionism in the long, rich shadows and canted angles he uses to depict post-WWII Vienna. Joseph Cotten plays a writer searching for his childhood friend, presumed dead but under shady circumstances. Orson Welles eventually turns up in one of his most memorable performances, in a movie that frequently turns up on the list of the greatest ever made, full stop.

   Stream The Third Man on prime video

4. Paramount+: Chinatown (1974)

   The ’70s saw an echo boom of revisionist neo-noirs, appropriate for the most fertile period of American cinema since noir’s 1940s heyday. The best of them all is a signature Paramount movie that should logically never leave its streaming service: Chinatown, which has become the defining Los Angeles noir of the past 60 years. Director Roman Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne, and star Jack Nicholson are all in top form for a mystery whose combination of seamy personal details and municipal-corruption structure has been paid affectionate homage (and just plain ripped off) countless times.

   Stream Chinatown on Paramount+

5. When Peacock started out, it seemed eager to entice film buffs with a whole bunch of movies from the Universal library. These days, it seems to have vaulted most of those titles or licensed them elsewhere, and Peacock has become one of the barest services for movies made before 1990. It does, however, have the extremely recent neo-noir Honey Don’t! – it was in theaters just a few months ago, in fact. Way back then, Honey Don’t!, the second in a series of lesbian-themed genre movies from Ethan Coen and his partner Tricia Cooke, didn’t get great notices, dismissed as an insubstantia exercise from filmmakers who have done better (especially on movies co-directed with Ethan’s brother Joel). But in addition to being just plain funny and entertaining with a knockout Margaret Qualley performance, Honey Don’t! works best as a riff on noir tropes, centrally Qualley’s gender-flip of the hard-boiled detective. It may be the most underrated movie of the year.

   Stream Honey Don’t! on Peacock

6. Criterion Channel: Framed (1947)

   You can count on Criterion to go further than just the canon noirs; they regularly program more specific thematic groups that dig deeper into the genre, often surfacing a number of 80-minute gems that aren’t as familiar to casual movie-watchers. This Noirvember, they’ve unveiled a batch of “Blackout Noirs,” co-curated by Decider contributor and film expert Glenn Kenny. They’re all probably worth your time if you love the genre, but you might start with Framed, starring Glenn Ford (who also appeared in the classic noirs Gilda and The Big Heat) as a truck driver who literally runs into trouble when a minor traffic accident leads him into a small town where he’s ensnared in a framing scheme.

   Stream Framed on The Criterion Channel

7. From feast to famine! It’s probably not a great sign that searching “noir” on Netflix turns up titles like Miraculous (to be fair, it’s a French-made cartoon with a character called Cat Noir) and Mank (it’s… partially set in the 1940s?). But speaking of David Fincher: His second film for Netflix went back to his murderous, heavily noir-influenced roots with a story about a contract killer who makes a deadly mistake and spends the rest of the movie stalking and killing those who wronged him over his screw-up. Michael Fassbender is note-perfect in the lead, and the movie itself is as tightly calibrated as the unnamed assassin’s weapons.

   Stream The Killer on netflix

8. There’s a ton to choose from on Tubi, probably the most impressive collection of free-streaming classic movies available. But if you haven’t seen it, it’s tough to beat The Lady from Shanghai, yet another 1947 classic, this one from Orson Welles, who directed, produced, and starred alongside Rita Hayworth, his wife at the time. (They divorced soon after completing the film.) Beset by Welles’ usual studio conflicts and, like clockwork, later reclaimed as a terrific piece of filmmaking despite whatever compromises went into it, the movie is best-known for its climactic hall-of-mirrors shoot-out, one of those much-imitated sequences viewers may recognize without having actually seen the real thing before. But Shanghai is more than those memorable shots. Its instantly hooky story, with Welles as a seaman drawn into a death-faking scheme by his attraction to a femme fatale (Hayworth), makes it one of the legendary filmmaker’s most purely entertaining movies.

   Stream The Lady from Shanghai on Tubi

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.