…a great movie because of the detail…the Jackal is the logical extension of the triumph of money over the human spirit, an remorseless killer with zero inner life, existing only to thwart the will of the people for his own personal gain...

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 15, 2024

It is the sustained gentleness of Fred Zinnemann’s professional temperament that makes the picture a clockwork amusement to watch.

| Mar 4, 2024

Possesses a tonal coldness that aligns viewers with the assassin’s reptilian machinations. —Guest post by Michael Joshua Rowin

| Dec 20, 2022

Day Of The Jackal is not a great film, but it’s a damn good one, one of the very few films released this year that is worth all the trouble and expense of going out to the movies.

| Jun 15, 2022

As the tension rises, you feel terribly helpless. You just have to sit there and let it happen.

| Jun 14, 2022

Director Fred Zinnemann has provided a splendid film of thrilling, tense entertainment in The Day of the Jackal.

| Jun 9, 2022

Director Fred Zinnemann, scripter Kenneth Ross, and editor Ralph Kemplen (earning this film's sole Oscar nomination) all deserve high marks.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 2, 2020

Like the Jackal himself, the film is something of a professional without an identity.

| Apr 24, 2020

It's Fred Zinnemann's matchless direction that makes it such compelling viewing and an object lesson in suspense.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 24, 2020

Outstanding on almost every level.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 24, 2020

In short, as so often happens, a second-rate fiction has been transformed into a first-rate screen entertainment.

| Apr 24, 2020

All of this the cinema is properly and effectively equipped to handle. Zinnemann, with the help of an excellent script from Kenneth Ross, has tansferred the novel lock, stock, barrel and silencer to the screen.

| Apr 24, 2020

This is not a bad movie, it races by and entertains, after a fashion. It simply is not as good as it should have been.

| Jul 22, 2019

It's a polished and exciting thriller, mercifully unburdened with heavy political/philosophical digressions.

| Nov 1, 2007

A taut, suspenseful, and fascinating political thriller.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 1, 2007

The major asset of the film is that it succeeds in maintaining interest and suspense despite obvious viewer foreknowledge of the outcome.

| Nov 1, 2007

Like all Zinnemann's work, this meticulously crafted political thriller is involving but not exciting due to his detached perspective and the fact that we know the outcome, that De Gaulle wasn't assassinated, but it's cast with Europe's best actors.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 23, 2007

Low on documentary conviction and political context, but an intriguing exercise in concealing the obvious.

| Jan 26, 2006

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 9, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 3, 2005