A fantastic heist film... unrelenting brutality mixed with moments of humor and warmth.

| May 16, 2024

The guide for heist movies was created in 1955 with this film. A masterpiece that everyone has been trying to copy over the years. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 10/10 | Jan 7, 2023

Episode 23: Vox Lux / The Guilty / Shoplifters / The Mule / Rififi

| Original Score: 90/100 | Sep 5, 2021

"Dassin's first French film is a stylistic and thematic distillation of his best Hollywood work". [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 31, 2020

It doesn't play by conventional rules, opting for a chief thief whose motives aren't about spending millions and a getaway that's complicated by ruthless enemies.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 23, 2020

A pity that the film degenerates through attempting too much; for in the first half, when Dassin is working within his limitations, he creates an admirably incisive and entertaining piece of melodrama.

| Mar 18, 2020

A French crime-and-suspense yarn (with a dubbed English soundtrack) in which one sequence is worth the ticket-price all by itself: a wordless half-hour close-up of a major burglary in a Pais jewelry shop.

| Nov 6, 2019

...portrays a robbery in painstaking detail (and in a way that would not have been permitted by American censors in 1955)...

| Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 4, 2016

If elements of it seem overly familiar now, that's only because they were done first here, and picked up by every heist film that followed.

| Nov 25, 2015

Viewers become something like collaborators, invested in working out what, say, that umbrella is going to be used for - and then pleased to discover whether we've gotten it right or not.

| Sep 1, 2015

Jules Dassin doesn't waste much time in expressing exactly what he thinks of the criminals and gangster culture that rule his underworld.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 28, 2015

Sandwiched between two great American heist flicks -- John Huston's 1950 The Asphalt Jungle and Stanley Kubrick's 1956 The Killing -- French writer-director Jules Dassin's Rififi employs the three-act structure that works well for any film of this nature.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 18, 2014

The father of all caper films.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 24, 2014

[VIDEO ESSAY] However much associated as a classic film noir, Jules Dassin's adaptation of Auguste Le Breton's pulp novel serves more accurately as the premiere caper film.

| Original Score: A+ | Jan 14, 2014

This crime-heist film by the blacklisted director Jules Dassin is his masterpiece, a seminal, thoroughly detailed chronicle of a robbery and its violent aftermath that continues to exert influence on the genre.

| Original Score: A | Apr 1, 2011

Ao lado de Bob, O Jogador, este longa um dos melhores do gnero, tornando-se especialmente brilhante na longa seqncia do roubo, que, sem dilogos ou trilha sonora, revelou-se seminal e inesquecvel.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 8, 2009

It took an experienced US director, Jules Dassin, who has lived in France some years, to give the French gangster pic the proper tension, mounting and treatment. This pic has something intrinsically Gallic without sacrificing the rugged storytelling.

| Oct 30, 2007

The film turns moralistic and sour in the last half, when the thieves fall out.

| Oct 30, 2007

A familiar but effective parable of honor among thieves.

| Oct 30, 2007

Jules Dassin's classic jewel-thief caper of 1955 looks as smart as paint, with its unendurably tense, entirely wordless robbery section.

| Oct 30, 2007