It takes Mickey Spillane's unreconstructed macho lout Mike Hammer and brutally interrogates him, slapping him around in a jazzy bebop rhythm that rides right up to apocalypse.

| Original Score: A+ | Nov 29, 2022

The climax is so startlingly unusual that this Robert Aldrich-directed picture safely becomes unforgettable.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 23, 2020

By the time the movie comes to its gonzo Pandora's box conclusion on the beach, neither script nor screen have been able to keep up with reason, preferring instead to simply stay out of Hammer's way.

| Jul 22, 2020

An astonishing exercise in style without precedents. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Mar 10, 2020

The kind of films which takes your breath away and makes you grateful for independent cinema.

| Aug 1, 2019

Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer represents the deformed endproduct of a thousand 1940s tough-guy movies, transformed by now into a leisure-oriented 1950s man more interested in his hi-fi and his sports car than in heroics.

| Aug 13, 2018

The actors' idiosyncratic voices, wrapped around such chrome-plated poetry as "the great whatsit" and "va-va-voom," are as hauntingly musical as Aldrich's images.

| Sep 12, 2016

Aldrich's annihilating masterpiece, one of the decade's key works

| Dec 10, 2012

In the years since its release, Kiss Me Deadly has been copied so many times that many of its boldest elements are familiar, but they've done little to dull its overall impact.

| Original Score: 9.5/10 | Jul 9, 2011

The plot of the book is jettisoned for something altogether more terrifying and mysterious: Possession of a box that glows from within every time it is opened, however briefly. If that sounds like Pulp Fiction, well, it is, only 40 years earlier.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 3, 2011

Kiss Me Deadly was so far out there that it is usually viewed as an end point to the classic film noir cycle.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jun 28, 2011

... delivers a pulp punch while it savagely satirizes the entire hardboiled mythos with its bare-knuckle brutality, flights of purple prose dialogue and he-man chauvinism ...

| Jun 27, 2011

one of the most memorable of American film noir, a remarkable fusion of hard-boiled mystery and atomic horror

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 23, 2011

...a cubist noir of the atomic age.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 20, 2011

As brutal and cynical as the movie is, Aldrich knows how to seduce the audience; it still resembles a crackerjack crime movie.

| Jun 17, 2011

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 16, 2011

I theme and style, Aldrich's apocalyptic film noir is an eccentric work, in many ways ahead of its times.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 10, 2011

In the dingy, black-and-white halls of the film noir pantheon, they've a special place set aside for Kiss Me Deadly.

| Mar 27, 2009

This independently produced low-budget film was a shining example for the New Wave directors -- Truffaut, Godard, et al -- who found it proof positive that commercial films could accommodate the quirkiest and most personal of visions.

| Mar 27, 2009

The trail leads to a series of amorous dames, murder-minded plug-uglies and dangerous adventures that offer excitement but have little clarity to let the viewer know what's going on.

| Oct 30, 2008