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

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

| Original Score: 2/4 | 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

The film, told in flashbacks, is held together by a poetically lurid interior monologue and directed, by Edgar G. Ulmer, with harrowingly expressive effects of light and shadow.

| Nov 26, 2018

Uniformly good performances and some equally good direction and dialog keep the meller moving.

| Oct 16, 2007

One of the most daring and thoroughly perverse works of art ever to come out of Hollywood.

| Oct 16, 2007

Like great garage rock, however, Ulmer's landmark film ultimately derives its raw, jittery vitality from its very crudeness.

| May 1, 2006

Passion joins with folly to produce termite art par excellence.

| Jan 26, 2006

It lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has easily forgotten it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000