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

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

The Big Sleep, though, is witty and sinister, and in an odd way is a realistic portrayal of big-city life with Arabian Nights overtones.

| Aug 30, 2012

No screen couple, before or since, had as much chemistry as Bogart and Bacall.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 23, 2010

Bogart as Marlowe is compelling in this classic thriller that is complex but triumph of atmospheric cool.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 18, 2008

Brittle Chandler characters have been transferred to the screen with punch by Howard Hawks' production and direction, providing full load of rough, tense action most of the way.

| Jul 18, 2008

What you remember here are moments.

| Jul 18, 2008

This is arguably the high-water mark of Hollywood's love affair with the infinitely slippery possibilities of the English language.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 24, 2006

The dialogue is hard-boiled and crackles with wit, the plot is fast-paced and nearly impenetrable, and Humphrey Bogart is coolly unflappable in Howard Hawkes’s stylish noir classic.

| Original Score: A | Oct 3, 2003

It's likely to leave you confused and dissatisfied.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 20, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 15, 2002

Don't try too hard to follow the story, just get swept away by the mood of the film.

| Jan 22, 2002

It is typical of this most puzzling of films that no one agrees even on why it is so puzzling. Yet that has never affected The Big Sleep's enduring popularity, because the movie is about the process of a criminal investigation, not its results.

| Jan 1, 2000

Fascinating if not necessarily improved edition of Howard Hawks' 1946 detective classic.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000