TOP 10 FİLMS OF ALL TİME

Meet 23-year-old escaped killer Bowie Bowers and his farm-girl sweetheart Keechie Mobley (Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell), in an imaginary idyll of peace and contentment that will never come true for them. Bowie, jailed at 16 for killing his father's murderer, has known nothing but jail, and is still a boy. Having escaped the prison farm with two older bank robbers – T-Dub and the psychotic Indian Chicamaw "One-Eye" Mobley (Jay C Flippen, Howard da Silva) – he feels loyalty-bound to tag along on their crime spree. Keechie is Chicamaw's niece, and soon circumstances force them to lam it cross-country at the same time as they tremblingly discover love for the first time.

Kiss Me Deadly is the black-hearted apotheosis of film noir, and a key film of the 50s, embodying the profoundest anxieties of Eisenhower's America: it ends with the detonation of a nuclear device on Malibu beach and, presumably thereafter, the end of the world itself. Robert Aldrich's moral universe is so violently out of kilter that even his opening credits run upside down. His hero, Mike Hammer, is an amoral, proto-fascist bedroom detective and 1,000% scumbag, but the villains he encounters are far, far worse.

Taking its atmospheric title from a line in Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled novel Red Harvest (an allusion never explained), Blood Simple is perhaps the Coen brothers' most straightforward movie, even though it is, ironically, not at all simple. In a manner that would come to be their stock-in-trade, the film is a cacophony of cross-purposes, in some ways a rehearsal for their breakout effort Fargo, which also depicts a nefarious plan gone wrong. It also marks the use of literary genre elements in the "real" world, a formula that would later be refined by Quentin Tarantino.

Louis Malle's first fiction feature, based on Noel Calef's 1956 novel, occupies a very interesting space. It qualifies as film noir for its appropriation of US postwar cinema in its tale of lovers gone bad, but also heralds the imminent arrival of the French new wave. The director was in his mid-20s at the time and clearly using the crime-thriller genre (something he never returned to) as a testing ground and not a strict template. Perhaps that explains why his film is such a melting pot of influences, drawing not only on Hitchcock but also the Master of Suspense's overseas admirers, including Henri-Georges Clouzot and his Les Diaboliques.

"One of the amazing things about The Third Man," Steven Soderbergh once wrote, "is that it really is a great film, in spite of all the people who say it's a great film." He's right. It's one of the greatest, in fact: a witty, elegantly shot and steadfastly compassionate thriller suffused with the dreadful melancholia of the finest noir. It's set in Allied-occupied Vienna, where writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) pitches up at the invitation of his old chum Harry Lime. Except that when Martins arrives, Lime turns out to be dead. At least that's the prevailing wisdom at his funeral.

No one ever smoked and brooded and loomed like Robert Mitchum. And he never did it as definitively as he does in Out of the Past, a stylish and devastating noir that was one of a hat-trick of perfect genre pieces directed by Jacques Tourneur in the 1940s (along with Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie). Viewers not enamoured of the actor's somnambulant manner might take the latter title for a description of what it must be like to act alongside Mitchum. But that would be to miss the bitter, internalised hurt and wounded hope he brings to his performance here; just because he's still, that doesn't mean he's not suffering.

Cameron Crowe called Double Indemnity "flawless film-making". Woody Allen declared it "the greatest movie ever made". Even if you can't go along with that, there can be no disputing that it is the finest film noir of all time, though it was made in 1944, before the term film noir was even coined. Adapting James M Cain's 1935 novella about a straight-arrow insurance salesman tempted into murder by a duplicitous housewife, genre-hopping director Billy Wilder recruited Raymond Chandler as co-writer. Chandler, said Wilder, "was a mess, but he could write a beautiful sentence".

In the novel Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson – the source material for this movie – the hero is an American man who has been married to a Mexican woman for nine years. It was Orson Welles who flipped the racial mix, and made the marriage brand new. Welles intended a story of three frontiers: the rancid Mexican-American border; the way a good detective becomes a bad cop; and a provocation on interracial sexuality. To be sure, it's a recognisable Charlton Heston in makeup as Mike Vargas, with Janet Leigh as Susie – but in 1958, that bond disturbed a lot of viewers. Moreover, the overtone of honeymoon is a wicked setup for threats of rape. Will the horrendous border scum get to Susie before Mike? If you doubt that suggestiveness, just notice how the car bomb explodes as the honeymooners are ready to enjoy their first kiss on US soil.

The movie captures the city in a summer heatwave: the blinding exteriors dazzle the eye and blur the judgment; shafts of light create a sinister atmosphere as they penetrate the dark interiors through venetian blinds. Jerry Goldsmith's superb score uses strings and percussion during moments of suspense and a distant, and bluesy trumpet for elegiac, contemplative scenes. Above all there is Nicholson's Gittes, a cocky, confident operator losing his social moorings and ending up as the proverbial drowning man reaching out for straws.

The "big sleep" of the title is of course death, but the action in Howard Hawks's classic hardboiled thriller from 1946, taken from the Raymond Chandler novel, often looks like the sleep of reason bringing forth monsters. Only the fiercest concentration will keep you on top of the head-spinning plot, and in fact the plot reportedly defeated its stars and director while they were actually shooting, cutting, reshooting and arguing about it. An explanatory scene was removed and replaced with one showing the leads flirting in a restaurant. Plot transparency was sacrificed in favour of the film's sexual mood music and making its female star, Lauren Bacall, every bit as compelling as she could be. The fact that Hawks moreover had to be relatively coy about the pornography and drugs makes the proceedings look even more occult and mysterious.