Detour plays like a fever dream powered by guilt and dread; an existential noir about an American male lost in the nothingness and vastness of the country.

| Nov 7, 2023

I like to think of Edgar G. Ulmer’s waking nightmare Detour (1945), an existential, almost surreal thriller, as the “B”-est film noir ever made.

| Dec 3, 2022

...a quick, grimy, and above all else guilty picture.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 6, 2021

Tom Neal does extremely well in the long, difficult role of the petrified pianist whose misadventures are told in flashback; while Ann Savage all but blisters the screen with her venoemous, snarling performance as the vicious Vera.

| Dec 29, 2020

Ann Savage, who plays a no-good, does a beauty of a job... We feel you will have a bond of sympathy for Neal, both in person and story and that always makes for a good show.

| Dec 29, 2020

How fate can play tricks on a man is satisfactorily demonstrated in a melodrama with enough bite to command the attention closely throughout.

| Dec 29, 2020

[Detour] is a morbid melodrama, depressing and uninteresting.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 29, 2020

It Is a not-too-late-believable story of a piano player who ruined his life by hitch-hiking from New York to Los Angeles to marry his girl -- but it is told bluntly and briskly by Director Edgar Ulmer.

| Dec 29, 2020

Venturing far from the familiar melodramatic pattern, director Edgar G. Ulmer has turned out an adroit, albeit unpretentious production about a man who stumbles into a series of circumstances which seal his doom.

| Dec 29, 2020

One of the most poignant and disturbing stories to reach the screen in any year is this one. You're not just looking at a picture; you're right in it and suffering along with the man whose troubles are being told.

| Dec 29, 2020

A remarkably pacey and stylish B-movie thriller that's now rightly recognised as a minor classic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 29, 2020

As effective as Neal's performance is, it's not the one for which Detour is best remembered. His foil is Ann Savage as Vera, living up to her surname as one of the most vicious, despicable femme fatales in noir history.

| Dec 29, 2020

...a compelling setup that's employed to watchable yet pervasively erratic effect by Ulmer...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 8, 2020

The inevitable fatalism of the oblivious heterosexual male remains at its most disconsolate zenith in Edgar G. Ulmer's timeless odyssey of anxiety.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 14, 2020

Table-turning, bluffing, hilarious verbal observations, and vitriolic insults compound with laugh-out-loud coincidences for a truly unique thriller.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 5, 2020

Well produced and directed, the picture sustains a tense mood throughout.

| Jul 8, 2020

Detour is about as threadbare as they come: a small film, shot on a shoestring over a handful of days at a Poverty Row film studio. And yet, the finished product is uniquely compelling.

| Jun 25, 2019

one of the darkest and most fatalistic of the postwar film noir-to the point that, if it didn't work so well, it could be mistaken for a postmodern parody of the genre

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 8, 2019

Ulmer brings an enormous amount of impressionistic creativity and (what are now considered) infamous noir tropes into the project without spending more money.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 5, 2019

One of the most dour, dank and despairing of all film noir offerings.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 23, 2019