The nights are drawing in and a chill is in the air and there is no finer time or place to indulge yourself in the cinema of noir than on a Sunday afternoon at Filmhouse this November. 

Noirvember began as a month-long film watching challenge and celebration of the genre by film critic Marya E. Gates, and quickly gained traction on social media. The Filmhouse Programming team were only too happy to find the perfect excuse to showcase titles from this gritty and subversive genre which often challenged the studio system, found subtle ways to work around the Hays Code and has given us some of the most iconic performances in cinema.

This year we explore classics from the French canon: Rififi (made by the blacklisted Hollywood director, Jules Dassin) and Le Trou (dir. Jacques Becker) both featuring lengthy and artfully choregraphed silent sequences. 

Joan Crawford shows her controlling, overbearing side in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, only to juxtapose that performance a few years later when she played a successful but easily-led newlywed in Sudden Fear (dir. David Miller).

Immoral newspaper men feature in both Ace in the Hole (dir. Billy Wilder) and Sweet Smell of Success (dir. Alexander Mackendrick), where the need to control the story destroys those around them. 

And in the final week of November, there's no finer way to round up the season than with one of the towering and assured presence of Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle (dir. John Huston) and The Killing (dir. Stanley Kubrick) – can this man ever plan a heist?

From opposite sides of the pond but both made in the same year on boot-strapped budgets set at Christmas time, we also have two neo-noirs to (not) get you in that festive mood! Blast of Silence (dir. Allen Baron) follows a hitman carrying out a dangerous assignment in New York whilst mid-era Hammer production, Cash on Demand (dir. Quentin Lawrence), sees Peter Cushing as a bank manager put in a hapless situation.