[Le Samouraï], with Delon doing what he does best (looking impassive and slightly tarnished), is a lovely introduction to the work of a most idiosyncratic filmmaker.

| Mar 18, 2025

The interweaving of ritualised Japanese and American themes, the formalised colour and camerawork that create a world at once fantastic, allusive and coherent, mark out Le Samouraï as both a Melville film and the Melville film to date.

| Mar 18, 2025

Everything is in harmony: acting, photography, editing. As an example of classic directorial technique, Le Samouraï should be required viewing for any film training school.

| Mar 18, 2025

What a gifted French director can with the sordid material is something else.

| Mar 18, 2025

Melville means to pay sober homage to all the Hollywood films that did all this but better. It is a pity that for all its virtues, [Le Samouraï]'s patina of high seriousness renders every scene forced and self-conscious.

| Mar 18, 2025

The film is totally fluid, totally legato. Rain on a car window, reflections of images in a glass doorway, the hardly changing visage of Delon, all serve to reinforce the impression of stillness and, more particularly, of lucidity and clearness of line.

| Mar 18, 2025

The story is classic, but ingeniously worked out, and the main interest of the film is aesthetic... A welcome return to the style of some of Melville's earlier films.

| Mar 18, 2025

Very cool, very obvious, and carefully banal, the film typifies the average French cinéaste's reverence for an era which to me depended on actors, most of whom are dead.

| Mar 18, 2025

A long, elegantly drab movie with little momentum.

| Mar 18, 2025

A superb study of the reactions and inconsistencies of an assassin's mind.

| Mar 18, 2025

As the noose tightens, theoretically the suspense should increase. It fails to do so in [Le Samouraï] because Jef is such a faceless character that we couldn't care less what happens to him.

| Mar 18, 2025

A samurai-like twist on the typical contract killer. The film, of course, also serves a generous dash of 1960s alienation...

| Sep 24, 2024

Almost devoid of dialogue, the film owes everything to the subtlety of the acting, the sinister beauty of Henri Decaë's photography and the intricacy of Melville's direction.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 6, 2024

Utilizing a riveting narrative and a compelling, impassive performance from Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai remains a remarkable classic of the crime thriller genre that is still often cited as a prime example of its kind.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 8, 2024

Despite the occasional op-art decor and other factors, Le Samourai’s hermetically sealed pulp objet d’art has aged less than nearly any other movie you could name from the era.

| Apr 27, 2024

One of [Jean-Pierre Melville's] best.

| Apr 17, 2024

Le Samouraï is a stone cold classic for a reason.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 25, 2024

Melville's style throughout is rigorously detached, his methods masterful in their economy. But it is the passion that pervades his portrait of a dysfunctional humanity that makes Le Samouraï one of the great French films.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 28, 2024

One can't expect less from a film that has inspired hundreds. There's something about sixties Paris that hypnotizes the viewer, few protagonists in the history of cinema have the presence of Alain Delon. An absolute masterpiece. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 10/10 | Aug 1, 2023

The film is suffused with heedless cool; it has been hugely influential on just about any hipster crime film that came after it.

| Original Score: A | Nov 29, 2022