10 Black and White Movies That Feel Strikingly Modern

These black and white movies still play very well in our colorful age.

Notorious (1946)

A lot of people like to claim that flawed, complicated heroines are a new product of our recently enlightened times.

We would direct them to Alfred Hitchcock's crackling Notorious, which is built around the question of whether Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) will try to clear her dirtied name in the service of U.S. agent T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant).

Throughout the film, Hitchcock plays with stereotypes and tropes about women and virtue, keeping us guessing until the last second about Alicia's motivations and loyalties. There's a meta narrative at work about what Hitchcock and the film believe, and we're on the edge of our modern seats, hoping the Hitch of nearly 80 years ago won't let us down.

It's a thriller in every sense.

The Apartment (1960)

Anora director Sean Baker quite deservedly gets respect for his insightful and bluntly funny films about the commodification of sex. But The Apartment created the blueprint.

The Billy Wilder masterpiece has a very dark setup: young clerk Bud (Jack Lemmon) has to loan out his apartment to executives who use it for secret trysts with vulnerable women. Worse, he's supposed to look the other way and disregard how this arrangement might be working out for the stoic Fran (Shirley MacClaine).

As in Baker's films, you can easily look at sex work or sexual barter as a metaphor for exploitation in general. It's incredibly cathartic to see Fran and Bud push back.

Psycho (1960)

Psycho will rid you of any ideas that old movies are stodgy and dull.

From the beginning, Janet Leigh's Marion Crane is a good girl gone bad, stealing from her boozy boss to flee across the Arizona desert to the arms of her deadbeat boyfriend. It's juicy as hell even before she meets the psycho of the title.

Yes, the expository ending is a letdown, but consider that Psycho came out when most people didn't know what a psycho was. Psycho made sure they didn't forget.

All About Eve (1950)

Bette Davis plays a Broadway star who won't give up the spotlight, and Anne Baxter is Eve Harrington, a shrewd manipulator ready to take her place.

It's a dynamic we've seen a million times since, from The Devil Wears Prada to Showgirls, but no one's done it better than All About Eve.

It also features an early appearance by Marilyn Monroe. And consider for a second how cool it is that the line, "Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy night!" came just a few years into commercial air travel becoming a thing.

Casablanca (1942)

Casablanca is a story of divided loyalties and fierce morality — a real movie for adults, trying to make their way in a complicated world, but also for kids trying to hold onto their ideals.

It's also fast — somehow faster than countless streaming shows and movies set in modern times.

And it's hard to think of a more quotable movie. Our favorite line — "I'm shocked, shocked" — remains as funny as it was in 1942, and is the first thing that comes to our mind with every new scandal to light up our phones.

Double Indemnity (1944)

Easily the most fun movie ever made about insurance, this noir extravaganza pops off the screen in moments like the anklet scene — aka the "how fast was I going" scene — between Fred McMurray as an insurance man and Barbara Stanwyck as a scheming client.

What makes the scene feel so alive is how the banter almost sputters out as Stanwyck's Phyllis reminds McMurray's Walter, again and again, that she's married.

But then he gets things back on track with a sizzling exit line. Just watch. No one has done a better setup for a forbidden romance.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1944)

If you ever long for the more innocent days of the past, watch The Postman Rings Twice to remind yourself they weren't so innocent.

We love a lot of things about this movie — John Garfield's romantic drifter, Lana Turner's scheming and beautiful Cora, the diner setting — but what we love most of all is how grounded and unsentimental it is.

It feels like Lana Del Rey got more than her first name from Lana Turner. Many of her modern anthems feel richly inspired by the noirs of the 1940s, and whether or not her young fans know the sources of her inspiration, the singer's success is proof that the dark noir aesthetic still has its fans.

It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

If you think of this as one of those schmaltzy Christmastime old movies, you're remembering it wrong.

This Frank Capra black and white movie never sidesteps the worst parts of life, which is why its ultimate affirmation about the importance of a single life is so convincing. It arrives at its central argument honestly.

Also, we've always agreed with this comment about how the phone scene between Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart, despite its lack of anything remotely gratuitous, is hot.

Dr. Strangelove (1964)

Fascists infiltrating the government, unqualified people tapped to lead our national defense, weird theories about bodily fluids...

When was this movie made again?

Breathless (1960)

This Jean-Luc Godard classic, filled with jump cuts that expose the artificiality of everything, feels like a critique of the earnestness of so many slow-moving modern films.

The breezy fatalism, meanwhile, feels like a mockery of the strident moralizing in so many modern Hollywood movies.

It's weird that one of the movies that feels most fresh and alive in 2024 came out 66 years ago.

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Main image: Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Warner Bros.