AUGUST 11 - SEPTEMBER 2

The pitiless urban nightmare that is film noir — a nasty, nihilistic netherworld of hard-boiled anti-heroes, double-crossing dames, deluded and disillusioned dupes, rain-slicked city streets, and existential dread and loneliness — is one of the American cinema’s most aesthetically rich, influential, and angst-ridden genres. Pacific Cinémathèque’s annual Film Noir summer series celebrates noir in all its stylish, seductive and cynical glories, and has become one of the most popular events on our calendar.

This year, 15 dark gems from the genre’s vintage early-1940s-to-late-1950s heyday — “an immensely creative period, probably the most creative in Hollywood’s history,” says American director, Taxi Driver screenwriter and seminal noir critic Paul Schrader — will screen over 13 sultry nights in August and two more in early September. Included are noirs essential and definitive, as well as rarities, buried treasures, and newly rediscovered destined-to-be-classics. Viewers are cautioned, as always, to expect appalling amounts of crime, corruption and chaos, venality and greed, melancholy and bitterness, moral disorientation, female treachery, male disenchantment and sexual stupidity, world-weary fatalism, and postwar pessimism. All served up in a dangerous delirium of head-spinning hard-as-nails dialogue and eye-popping Expressionist style.