The phrase “film noir” often calls to mind the image of a fedora-clad sleuth investigating a perplexing crime that may or may not involve the woman he loves in a shadow-swarmed city in the 1940s.

Since its coining in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank, who observed from afar something dark, quite literally, going on at the American cinema, the term “film noir” has been debated and ...