Popular reviews

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  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★½

  Criterion Collection Spine #847

  "People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped. And that goes on 24 hours a day, every day in the year ... But suppose we had no police force, good or bad. Suppose we had ... just silence. Nobody to listen, nobody to answer. The battle's finished. The jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over."

  I was going to tease that this was just the American remake of 'Rififi', but it might be the other way around since this came out 5 years earlier. The Asphalt Jungle is pretty much your standard heist flick, but I suppose it should be given credit for being one of the early entries in the genre with great performances, and the…

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  Review by spap1 ★★★½ 2

  we are all human, so why are some of us seen as though we are not so?

  in a film that seems like a oh-so-subtle takedown of the stereotypical convention of ‘male-immortality’ in the face of extreme, gangster-related danger, Huston manages to create a perfect masterpiece for Hollywood’s golden age. 

  sometimes, at least for me anyway, things just feel as though they’re just not going your way. no matter how hard you try, anything you do will never seem as though it is enough for those around you, it will seem as though you’d be better off being dead rather than wallowing around in desperate attempts to please. 

  the sadness that pursues from this alone can feel all too much…

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  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★★ 3

  Noir-November Challenge! Movie #7

  A John Huston film disguised as a heist flick when its true strength is its character driven plot! Everything is seen from the point of view of the thugs or in this case hooligans!

  You know it did its job well when I find myself openly rooting for the more sympathetic characters and shaking my clenched fist at the ones who truly had black hearts!

  The ending was a real heartbreaker!

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★½ 5

  I have to admit that I was a bit predisposed to like this movie, I might say even giddy. It stars Sterling Hayden, and he plays two of my favourite characters in two of my favourite films; The Killing, and Dr. Strangelove. While it could be argued, successfully, that he plays the same character every time, I don’t really care. I just love his no nonsense tough guy delivery. Probably even more than James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart.

  The first thing that struck me was the absence of score. Beyond the opening, there is none. The second thing that struck me was the sumptuous cinematography. This is a master plying his trade. This is the best looking and photographed Noir…

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  Review by 𝐏𝐚𝐨𝐥𝐨 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐆𝐮𝐟𝐟𝐢𝐧 🇮🇹 ★★★★

  The Asphalt Jungle is a very harsh noir drama that describes in minute detail a jewelry heist and the subsequent double games between the participants. It is remarkable for the psychological analysis of the characters and for the realistic description of the environment of the urban underworld. John Huston realizes a story of greed, paranoia and bad luck, wrapped in the night of an alienating and corrupt metropolis. Central part of the plot, the city is represented as an oppressive space that nullifies any desire to escape and prevents the protagonists' dreams from materializing. In addition to Huston's talent, the great result of the film is due to the quality of the novel from which it is based. William R.…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 5

  Leave it to John Huston to turn jewel theft into an act of hope. Compared with the grim deeds populating Huston’s noir streets, it’s positively a saintly deed in comparison. 

  “Asphalt Jungle” slides right into Huston’s catalogue of morose people living in hopeless worlds. 

  Huston sought in “Jungle” to appropriate the vérité style of Italian neorealist works. Blended with stylized genre standards, Huston created a film that exists on the margins of our dreaded nightmares and also on the rim of our somber reality. 

  Where the neorealists took to the streets to place their films among the ruins of Europe post-WWII, Huston had no such ready-made set. 

  Instead, “Jungle” populated the pessimism of the American psyche — as its soldiers returned from defeating The Great Evil, and found themselves asking... what next? What happens when we are left only with the evil inside ourselves?

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★½ 1

  62/100

  Another semi-casualty (I do still like it) of my taste gradually evolving away from movies that are 95% plot. Hard to miss the theme, of course—Huston might as well have written it out in big flashing letters, Noé-style: LE HASARD DÉTRUIT TOUT—and Sam Jaffe's jukebox scene near the end encapsulates it beautifully (while also providing a proto-R&B erotic charge that even Marilyn Monroe* can't match). Other than that, though, spikes on the emotional EKG are few and far between; the two most poignant moments—Jean Hagen's heartbreakingly hopeful expression when Dix calls Doll back after she leaves his apartment, and Emmerich's wife hastily brushing her hair when she hears him returning to finish their card game—both involve women who are…

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  Review by Jordan Horowitz ★★★★½ 1

  A stone cold classic. That last shot.

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★½

  Based on the WR Burnett 1949 novel, and co-adapted and directed by John Huston, The Asphalt Jungle carefully establishes its characters as fundamentally impaired yet principally sympathetic, and it's this careful characterisation that's it's ultimate strength, especially in the latter half, which has the feeling of a downward spiral as the net gradually tightens on the various criminals. The movie accommodates a remarkable eleven-minute heist sequence with no accompanying musical score, and not only has a noteworthiness for instigating the heist genre but also stands as one of its greatest.

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  Review by WraithApe ★★★★½

  Fêted film noir from John Huston. One of the earliest to be based around a heist and as such a major influence on Kubrick's The Killing a few years down the line. In casting The Killing, Kubrick picked actors who impressed him from the noirs he liked, prompting him to bring back Sterling Hayden, who is the central protagonist in The Asphalt Jungle, for his own film.

  In comparing the two, I think Huston, as one of the genre's originators and masters, still has the edge on the apprentice. The Asphalt Jungle, unencumbered with voiceovers or bombastic musical cues, is a sinewy, economical noir that eschews fancy camerawork for more static shots, where the action often occurs within the set…

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★

  A perfect two-hour cinematic game of cops and robbers, but the cops are violent, untrustworthy, and malevolent, and the robbers are humanist regular Joes who steal from the rich in order to earn enough just to get by.

  Cops bad:
  Cobby: "Oh, don't worry about Ditrich. He's on my payroll. Practically a partner. Me and him, we're like that."
  Doc: "Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. Just when you think one's all right, he turns legit."

  Robbers good:
  May: "Oh, Lon, when I think of all those awful people you come in contact with — downright criminals — I get scared."
  Alonzo: "Oh, there's nothing so different about them. After all, crime is only a left-handed form…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 10

  The Asphalt Jungle is a movie about (white) men's faces. Their unshaven faces; their pockmarked faces. Their faces contorted by pain, or bright with pride. Their weary, lined faces.

  It's about how men look when they die.

  And it's a movie about power, and status. About a bankrupt man who holds power because the memory of his money bestows it upon him. About an ambitious private dick who knows better and wants more, and thinks it's just about time he stepped in and took what he deserved. About a corrupt cop who takes payoffs because it gives him pull; about a bookie who pays off cops because it makes him feel like a big man.

  It's a movie about community,…