Love Spider-Noir's Vibe? Then Watch These 8 Classic Noir Movies Next
The clue is in the title when it comes to Spider-Noir, so if you've developed a hankering for classic noir cinema after watching the show, you came to the right place.
Apparently while in-production on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord and Chris Miller were so stoked to land Nicolas Cage for the role of Spider-Noir that they basically just kept giving him lines of old-timey, Raymond Chandler-style dialogue to say, because every single line came out like solid gold.
As any fan will tell you, Cage’s take on the character became instantly iconic — so much so that fans were quick to start wishing for a spin-off. 10 years on, those wishes have finally come true with Spider-Noir, one of the funniest and most surprising live-action shows in Marvel’s history. This version of the web-slinger actually first appeared in comic book form in 2009, but his origins — and especially Cage’s approach to the performance — go back as far as the 1930s and the early days of film noir.
In the list below, I’ve rounded up classics of the genre to watch once you reach the ending of Spider-Noir. Some of these go all the way back to that early period, but there are more recent iterations from the likes of Tim Burton, Robert Rodriguez and Rian Johnson, too. Read on to learn a bit more about each of them and use the guide to find out where to stream them on services like AppleTV, Netflix, Prime Video and more.
If you watched Spider-Noir and liked the feeling of a city that’s rotten to the core, Fritz Lang’s M is one of the earliest movies to achieve this kind of atmosphere — and it really holds up.
Featuring an unforgettable performance from Peter Lorre (who you might know from later Hollywood movies like Casablanca) as a man being hunted for terrorising children, Lang’s shadowy masterpiece (much like his other great city masterpiece, Metropolis) still feels unnervingly modern, even as we approach its 100th birthday.
The Maltese Falcon might not be the first noir to use these tropes, but with its deadpan narration and hard-nosed (but honourable) P.I. protagonist Sam Spade (Bogart, of course), it sketched out a formidable blueprint that filmmakers and showrunners continue to follow to this day.
The story kicks off when Spade is hired to follow someone who ends up dead. He then finds himself involved in a hunt for a priceless statue and soon — like Spidey and a million other noir protagonists since — finds himself caught in a web (ahem) of backstabbing, ruthlessness and crime.
Taking place in the ruins of post-war Vienna, the location of Carol Reed’s The Third Man could hardly be further away from the New York of Spider-Noir, but much of the show’s aesthetics can be traced back to this timeless Orson Welles noir.
The most obvious factor is Reed’s iconic use of what filmmakers call “Dutch angles” (ie. filming characters in closeup with the camera tilted to about 30 or 40 degrees), all the better to suggest that their world and the rules that govern it are turning upside down.
Noir as a genre went a little out of fashion in the 1960s before coming back with an audible bang in the era of New Hollywood. The greatest so-called “neo-noir” of that time — and, I would argue, perhaps the greatest American film ever made — is Chinatown. It follows a P.I. played by Jack Nicholson as he descends into the Los Angeles criminal underworld and, in a way, the city’s dark subconscious.
In terms of Spider-Noir, you won’t find much, if any, of the same humour here, but you’ll definitely catch plenty of similarities in the performances, especially Brendan Gleeson’s Silvermane and Li Jun Li’s femme fatale.
If you enjoyed that Chrysler Building-esque, art deco energy in Cage’s new show, I recommend watching (or perhaps revisiting) Tim Burton’s 1992 classic Batman Returns. It might be a DC movie, but it’s also one of the most incredibly-realised comic book movies, and Burton was clearly drawing on old Hollywood and filmmakers like Fritz Lang when he sat down with his great production designer, Bo Welch, to create his vision of Gotham.
The movie also boasts a noirish tale, with Keaton’s Batman as the troubled detective and Pfeiffer’s Catwoman as a “femme fatale” who more than lives up to the that role.
Another ‘90s movie that spun a few new ideas from the noir blueprint — and one that also influenced the look and feel of Spider-Noir — is L.A. Confidential. Set in the 1950s and starring Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe (as two chalk and cheese detectives who have to work together to solve a mysterious murder) this is a movie that managed to do for noir in the ‘90s what Chinatown had done for the genre 20 years earlier.
If you’ve liked any of the other movies I’ve mentioned so far on this list, or that peak era of Russell Crowe, you’ll like this one too.
In terms of comic book movies that have drawn from the noir style, the most obvious are Robert Rodriguez’s duo of Sin City movies from 2005 and 2014. Like Spider-Noir, Rodriguez’s films — which are about as precise an adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novels as you could ask for — have all the pulpy dialogue and character tropes of the genre but also the panel-by-panel feel of the comics themselves.
At the time of their release, Sin City and A Dame to Kill For were the closest any filmmaker had come to expressing what reading a comic felt like on screen — a position they arguably held until Spider-Verse came along.
Before reinventing the murder mystery with Knives Out, and before briefly reinventing Star Wars with The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson cut his teeth as a filmmaker with this awesome noir-coded debut from 2005.
Starring Joseph Gordan Levitt, Brick basically takes the tropes of Bogey classics like The Maltese Falcon and reworks them into a fascinating and surreal high school movie. As ideas go, it’s incredibly effective, and as anyone who’s seen a Knives Out film (or an episode of Poker Face) will know, the director definitely knows his stuff when it comes to Hollywood and TV history and how best to use those genre tropes in a modern setting.
