Film-noir meaning

fĭlm' nwär'
Film noir is defined as a genre of urban crime movies from the 1940s and 1950s with a melodramatic, bleak or cynical feel.

An example of film noir is a Humphrey Bogart movie.

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A movie characterized by low-key lighting, a bleak urban setting, and corrupt, cynical characters.
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The genre or style of such movies.
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A type of film, esp. of the 1940s and 1950s, fatalistic, pessimistic, or cynical in mood and often dealing melodramatically with urban crime and corruption.
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A film of this type.
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Origin of film-noir

  • French film film (from English film film) noir black (from Old French) (from Latin niger, nigr- nekw-t- in Indo-European roots)
    From American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
  • Borrowing from French film noir (literally “black film”)
    From Wiktionary

Film-noir Sentence Examples

  • I love the way Wim Wenders used this song on American Friend, his greatest homage to classic film noir.

  • Minority Report is the bits and pieces of great film noir.

  • The work of Colleen or Cecile Schott bristles with the mystery and magic of the most abstract of scratchy old film noir incidental soundtracks.

  • The graphical style is simple and the game has taken on a sort of 1930s film noir look to it.

  • Welcome to A Question of Sex, a website devoted to the representation of gender in American film noir of the 1940s.

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Words near film-noir in the Dictionary