This fall, a dark shadow will be cast across Sunday afternoons by a series of film noir matinees tracing a crooked path through the cycle of fatalistic crime films that flourished in Hollywood during the Forties and Fifties. Sharing the bleak and violent worldview so central to the noir cycle, the twelve films assembled here are largely lesser-known expressions of film noir that nevertheless exemplify the new cinematographic and narrative complexity that noir introduced into the American cinema. Whether in the work of celebrated auteurs such as John Brahm, Anthony Mann, Max Ophüls and Otto Preminger, or lesser-known American filmmakers such as Cy Endfield, Joseph H. Lewis and Paul Wendkos, these films noirs balance their bleak pessimism with a formal daring that remains far ahead of their time.