Chandler’s words burn with pain and self-destruction, but Hawks — who valued strength, independence and action — neutered the inefficiency and hatefulness of Marlowe’s rage.

| Nov 21, 2023

This is the best plot I’ve ever seen pull this many threads together in such a way where you don’t always have to know what’s going on to know what’s going on. The magic of Bogart.

| Aug 30, 2022

... an American classic, arguably the greatest film made for a Chandler novel, and the definitive pairing of legendary screen team Bogie and Bacall.

| May 6, 2022

Just when a few solutions are offered up, further conundrums arise, as if fate dictates that Marlowe can never really be finished with a case.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 3, 2020

For all the untidiness of its plot, The Big Sleep is, however, an enjoyable melodrama, exciting most of the time and comic when it chooses to be.

| Oct 22, 2019

There has probably never been so much plot in a film -- but it doesn't seem to matter. It, all looks very exciting, and if you follow half of it you'll get through.

| Jul 22, 2019

It is a fast-moving drama, knee-deep in corpses, as tough as they come. It is rather'difficult to keep track of who is murdering whom and why, but there is not time to worry about such details with so many bullets flying around.

| Jul 22, 2019

It is brilliantly directed and photographed. It moves with breathless speed. The acting is admirable. The dialogue (Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner are among those credited) is of an unusually high level of humour and crispness.

| Jul 22, 2019

...seriously, does anyone care how the chauffeur died?

| Original Score: 8/10 | Feb 13, 2019

To watch The Big Sleep is to witness a distinctly American film genre at the heights of its power, nonsensical plot notwithstanding.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 29, 2018

"I don't like your manners." "I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad... I grieve over them on long winter evenings."

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 21, 2018

The plot's complexity and slow unravelling of its subject matter of exploitation, blackmail and murder, make it the obvious precursor to some of the great, modern noir dramas.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 16, 2018

The development is solid... with the almost constant presence of an ironic Humphrey Bogart, perfectly aware of his fullness as an actor. [Full review in Spanish]

| Feb 6, 2018

The Big Sleep remains one of the greatest film noirs ever made.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Dec 14, 2017

The plethora of killings now seems on the whole less horrific than it once did, while the film's tone of escalating absurdity in a genuinely dark world grows if anything even more sprightly as the years go by.

| Feb 22, 2017

Classic noir gem has menace, innuendo.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 4, 2016

The Big Sleep is the best scripted, best directed, best acted, and least comprehensible film noir ever made.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 13, 2014

The plot is a bundle of confusions, but who cares? Few films have made cigarettes seem so glamorous. Or had such seductive repartee.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 7, 2014

The Big Sleep is as fresh and perverse as ever, and remains one of Hollywood's most entrancingly strange bedtime stories.

| Mar 7, 2014

The Big Sleep is wakeful fare for folks who don't care what is going on, or why, so long as the talk is hard and the action harder.

| Mar 7, 2014