With Internet web logs and message boards offering new point, click, and type soapboxes at a geometrically increasing rate, maybe it’s time to admit that everyone, as the old joke goes, really is a critic after all. Ifthere’s one thing that the shorthand-heavy Internet encourages, it’s a tendency to rely on buzzwords to boil down whole decades of work and gild opinion to the point that it sparkles like fact. The acreage of actual musical territory covered by terms like “punk,” “country,” and “rockabilly,” in all their “alt,” “classic,” “pre,” “post,” “proto,” and “neo” prefixes and suffixes, for instance, is a critical reality roughly comparable to the tent in the Beatles movie “Magical Mystery Tour” that, though tiny on the outside, hides a cavernous ballroom within.

When navigating the back alleys of film history, “film noir” may be the two-word term groaning under the most misplaced weight. The French phrase that was initially used to describe roughly eight years of particularly dark American crime films has spread across the world and the generations like the impulse to declare a “new wave” whenever an incoming generation of artists air out some ideas that have lately fallen out of vogue.

By (my) strict definition, a “film noir” is an American film, made between 1940, when Boris Ingster’s cheap, stylish, and airless “Stranger on the Third Floor” made its debut, and 1958, the year that Orson Welles’s “Touch of Evil” closed the books on the elusive genre. If not directed by a European, a film noir at least has to have a strong Germanic influence, fallout from the stylistic experiments conducted at Weimar Germany’s UFA studios between the wars.

Finally, regardless of whether its script is inclined toward Freudian tropes, shoton-location realism, romance, topicality, satire, or violence, a true “film noir” has to have a deeply felt and communicated fatalism — a sense that its major characters are doomed from the start and that we’re along for the ride to see how fate “sticks out a foot to trip them up,” to paraphrase the paradigmatic film noir “Detour.”

With the necessary dates and bloodlines identified, one director stands head, shoulders, and monocle over every other purveyor of Venetian blind light slashes, rain slick streets, femmes fatales, and ignoble finishes. As the title of the Museum of the Moving Image’s new film retrospective declares, Fritz Lang is truly “King of Noir.”

Even when style squarely trumped substance, as it did at various times during the director’s career, Lang’s crime pictures bore a spectacularly high level of filmmaking craft and ingenuity, as well as a striking fascination with the human capacity to obsess, do harm, generate guilt, and self-destruct. Spanning the years between 1931 and 1956, “Fritz Lang: King of Noir” offers a loosely chronological and nearly complete survey of the crime film reign of one of cinema’s most creative minds and one of the 20th century’s most influential popular artists.

Moving Image’s four-week program kicks off with 1931’s German-made film noir preamble “M,” a movie in which Lang chose to harness the leap forward that the talkies presented with a story of a compulsive child murderer whose lack of discretion puts him on the wrong side of both the law and the underworld. Lang’s American debut, “Fury,” produced by future “All About Eve” and “Guys and Dolls” director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, transplanted that abiding lack of trust in human social institutions and the whims of destiny into a small town America where Spencer Tracy barely escapes lynching for a crime he did not commit.

“Fury” remains an expertly grim tour de force of 1930s filmmaking. It also cemented Lang’s careerlong conflict with producers and other collaborators. “Spencer Tracy, together with the entire cast and crew, loathed Fritz Lang,” Mankiewicz recalled years later. With the notable exception of costar Sylvia Sidney, with whom Lang would work two more times, the director was inclined toward poor relations with his casts, crews, and financiers — an unfortunate tendency that would see Lang’s budgets and directorial prestige reduced to joblessness by the 1960s.

Lang’s particularly stormy and intimate relationship with producer Walter Wanger and Wanger’s wife, the actress Joan Bennett, with whom the director formed a production company, yielded two of the high points of the director’s crime film career — “The Woman in the Window” and “Scarlet Street” — as well as one of the more bizarre entries in the Lang oeuvre, “Secret Beyond the Door.” A movie of both brooding doom and lip-smacking pulpy sensationalism, “Scarlet Street” centers on an unsavory love triangle of prostitute, pimp, and henpecked john, then climaxes in a brutal murder en route to the most satisfyingly downbeat ending in the history of American film. Moving Image will be showing the Library of Congress’s archival print of “Scarlet Street,” (the source of Kino International’s recent DVD issue of the film) and, since the film has languished in public domain limbo for decades, the Moving Image screening is not to be missed.

1937’s “You Only Live Once” single-handedly launched the venerable American cycle of lovers-onthe-run-from-the-law films. Though it is the stylistic godfather to Nicholas Ray’s “They Live by Night,” Joseph H. Lewis’s “Gun Crazy,” Godard’s “Pierrot le Fou,” Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us,” and Ridley Scott’s “Thelma and Louise,” “You Only Live Once,” with its energetic ink-shadowed world of pursuing cops and lousy weather, has never been topped. The film’s violently dynamic robbery scene remains particularly stunning.

Moving Image will also screen 1950’s “House by the River,” Lang’s entry into a peculiar Hollywood subgenre of suspense films such as “The Spiral Staircase” and “Gaslight,” which were set in the Steven Foster era “gay ’90s.” Lang rarely preoccupied himself with the relative likability of his lead characters, and Stephen Byrne (played in “House by the River” with vulpine cool by Louis Hayward), an rich novelist turned capricious sex murderer, is arguably one of the director’s most deserving victims of fate.

Fritz Lang always had his finger on the pulse of the worst human instincts gone wild, and he depicted them in the most modern cinematic way. In the words of Peter Bogdanovich, “His dark vision was very much representative of what the 20th century was like. Unfortunately that has not helped his reputation.”

Through September 30 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens, 718-784-0077).