Critic Reviews

There is one cool, understated scene after another.

For some of us, this constitutes a religious event.

Watching Le Cercle Rouge, we're caught up in a world that, however improbable some of its twists and turns seem, strikes us as a perfect, imaginative creation.

A glistening gem among caper movies, this impeccably elegant jewel-heist drama takes its title from Buddhist lore, its cast from France's great gallery of leading men, and its style from the unique blend of cinematic savoir-faire and brooding existential angst.

The antidote to every square tough-guy caper you've ever seen, and the inspiration for many great ones. It is an existential imperative to seek out a showing and burn rubber to get there, preferably in an excellent car.

A slo-mo gem of gangster cool, of vintage Hollywood noir reimagined by a French new waver in love with American cars, American jazz, and the kind of trench-coated tough-guys embodied by Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum.

It was Melville's second-to-last feature, and it shows him in top form, with a more generous dose of humor than usual.

A dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters and cigarettes.

When it was released in the United States more than 30 years ago, its distributor hacked away 40 minutes of its precise structure. This rerelease restores every meticulous second of Melville's cinematic fantasy.

Melville seems to peer out from behind the camera with a reassuring wink and nod. Le Cercle Rouge is the most self-consciously cool of his famously underheated films noirs.