Film Noir

Overview

When life is bleak, art reacts. When the world went through the Great Depression in the 1930s and then went back to war before the decade was out, filmmakers responded with dark cinematic tales. That's when the genre of film noir was born, and it has been showering viewers with stories of crime, gangsters, double-crossing, femme fatales, private detectives and gritty streets ever since — whether following two lovers scheming to be together in 1944's Double Indemnity, unleashing violence upon New York in 1976's Taxi Driver, or pondering just what happened when a wife goes missing in 2015's Gone Girl.

They're just three of the titles on offer at the Gallery of Modern Art's Film Noir program, which runs through classics old and new between March 31 and May 21. Come Wednesday and Friday evenings, as well as Saturday and Sunday afternoons, GOMA's Cinematheque will be stepping through the essential flicks from both the genre's heyday and the decades that followed.

Yes, this is a lineup that features Underworld, 1927's silent crime effort that's considered to be at the forefront of mobster cinema, as well as Goldstone, Ivan Sen's Aaron Pedersen-starring outback thriller from 2016. Hitchcockian hijinks in Strangers on a Train, Jack Nicholson being a nosy investigator in Chinatown, a young Natalie Portman in Leon: The Professional, Fargo's snowy antics and Drive's seductive sheen are all on the bill too, as is a big-screen revisit of Blade Runner before the sequel hits later this year