Several years ago Marya Gates, @oldfilmsflicker on Twitter, started #Noirvember, a yearly celebration of all things film noir. It’s a great way for the online community to share their mutual love for this amazing genre of classic film.

For those of you unfamiliar with film noir, it’s a movie genre born out of post-WWII Hollywood and known for its particular brand of storytelling and visual style, the use of light and shadow, the blurring of lines between good and bad, and the depiction of crime, vice, and sexuality. It was given the name Film Noir by French film critics in the mid-1950s.

The heyday of film noir lasted from 1944 to the end of the 1950s and produced some of the best movies ever made. When people give the 1950s a bad rap for being squeaky clean, I point to films from this genre and from others to show naysayers that not everything was white picket fences and family dinners back then.

Let’s take a look at some of my favorite films noir (yes, that’s how you pluralize it!) from the 1950s. And if you want to explore more options beyond the five films I recommend, take a gander at the DVD Netflix Film Noir genre page: