START with cigarette smoke rising in a dimly lit room. Add a detective in a trenchcoat with a gun in his pocket, a seductive heroine with a shadowy past and a dark secret. Mix in a cynical attitude and some snappy dialogue and stir it all in atmospheric black and white photography and you have film noir.

The term generally refers to Hollywood films made in the 1940s and 1950s, often inspired by the Depression era crime writing of the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hamnett.

Classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep featuring stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Barbara Stanwyck are towering examples of the quality of the genre.

But the Hollywood films were born out of German Expressionism, an influential multi-media movement that inspired the dramatic angles and deep shadows of the Hollywood films and by the atmosphere of French films of the 1930s like Marcel Carne's Jour Se Leve that contained the cynical attitude that would become Bogie's trademark.

As Quad celebrates all things noir on the back of the major new exhibition A Darkness More Than Night, a special film season takes a wider look at its impact on world cinema.

There's an Akira Kurosawa film from 1949, a Dario Argento Italian offering from 1970 and even a mystery movie – the name of which will be kept secret until the night.

Adam Marsh, Quad's cinema programmer, said: "With this season we are aiming to shine a light on the darker corners of film noir.

"Over the past couple of years we have shown many of the classic film noirs, so we took a different approach by looking at what other countries made of the noir aesthetic.

"Alongside a classic US film noir, we have examples from US-occupied post-war Japan, a Brit noir, an Italian 'Giallo' thriller and a film from France – the country that spawned the 'noir' name.

"And what would a noir season be without a mystery? Our mystery film screening is a true delight."