A decadent treat.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 25, 2024

This kind of thriller calls for finesse, perception and a knife-edged narrative drive. Plein soleil looks too often instead like an over-illustrated travel brochure.

| Feb 11, 2020

There is some good stuff in the first half hour... [But] the film degenerates to cops and robbers.

| Jul 30, 2019

The tension is tantalisingly controlled, while the sight of the young Alain Delon languishing shirtless on a yacht provides a textbook definition of cool, and might be said to alone warrant the price of admission.

Full Review | Dec 15, 2018

Filmed in sumptuous colour, it's a deliciously amoral thriller with a devilishly attractive star.

| Dec 15, 2018

Its mechanical aesthetic suggests that rather than having to sublimate what remorse Tom Ripley might feel toward his actions, he simply doesn't experience any.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 10, 2014

This expertly made film is utterly mesmerising. And its exploration of ruthless ambition is still fiercely timely.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 3, 2013

Alain Delon excels as gentleman psychopath Tom Ripley in René Clément's beautifully restored classic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 29, 2013

Delon is a terrifically good in the role: his almost unearthly perfection is creepy itself, as if he is imitating a human being.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 29, 2013

Highsmith had some doubts about the ending, which feels less daring than the one in her book, but there's a clever irony to it Hitchcock would have appreciated.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 29, 2013

Tempering Hitchcockian intent with the experimentalism of the French New Wave, the result is as seductive as it is suspenseful: a bracing study of amorality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 28, 2013

It's Delon -- impossibly beautiful, impossible to read, cold, cool -- who steals the film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 27, 2013

Condemned now to exist in the shadow of a talented impersonator, this earlier adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's remarkable novel has been all too readily overlooked, despite possessing considerable charms of its own.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 23, 2013

Plein Soleil remains a masterpiece. It defined the career of its director, who became known as the French Hitchcock.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 16, 2013

Clément's strategy is to film Ripley's actions with little editorializing and the film is both laid-back and taut at the same time, especially in the second half of the film as the stakes get higher and it becomes more of a thriller.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 16, 2013

Having just discovered its existence, I was interested to see this 1960 French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel which Anthony Minghella also adapted in 1999, as The Talented Mr Ripley

| Jul 7, 2012

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 7, 2011

The sinister occurs within the confines of the beautiful, like a disease eating away a beautiful tree from the inside.

| Nov 18, 2008

A gem of a psychological thriller, with Alain Delon and Marie Laforet in top form, Rene Clement's French version of Patricia Highsmith's noir novel is far superior to Minghella's 1999 remake.

| Original Score: A | Jun 14, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 8, 2005