Charles Mudede has written, "If you love film noir, then you must love the Noir City festival, which will feature a number of known and less known movies in this genre that has lots of spiderlike women, lots of long knives, lots of rooms with dark curtains, lots of faces of the fallen, and lots of existential twists and turns." All of these will be delivered at the 2020 edition, which will focus on dark crime cinema from outside the US: The Beast Must Die and The Black Vampire (an adaptation of Fritz Lang's M) from Argentina, Panic and Finger Man from France, A Colt Is My Passport and Branded to Kill from Japan, Victim (on 35mm!) from Britain, and many more.