Popular reviews

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  Review by karsten ★★★★ 7

  not like any noir film i’ve seen. even when nothing is really happening, things still feel like they’re moving forward. which was cool! mostly referring to the romantic stuff. running on 4 hours of sleep and also drove for like 8 hours today. so it only feels right to end on a film that has over one million shots of people driving cars. an exaggeration, of course! how do i end this review so i can go to bed?

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★

  If Nicholas Ray makes a film about innocent people, then they have to be innocence personified - the only things they know must be the harsh realities of the world, so they can discover tenderness. So its equal parts a film tragic and beautiful - it's impossible for me not to be moved watching the paradise Bowie and Keechie find while hiding from the world, watching them gaze into each others eyes as though seeing things they never knew existed. Everything else reflects back on Ray's early days with Theatre of Action - it's a capitalist world, where a character even refers to Bowie himself as an investment - tenderness isn't even an exception, it cannot exist in this world.…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★★ 4

  You only love once.

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  Review by josh lewis ★★★★

  "i won't sell you hope when there isn't any."

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  Review by abid_ism 2

  it's wild this motherfucker who looks like he was born a full grown pirate with his eyepatch and never ending half cigarette coming out of his mouth directed some of the most earnestly romantic interactions in american movie history. just an absolute uncanny ability to wreck you with scenes that would have made keats give up writing poems cause he couldn't live up to these moments. moments that feel like you're looking up at the clouds on a sunny 74 degree day and all you can hear is the sound of bees buzzing and the breathing of someone you love laying next to you.

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  Review by Jizzmonkey ★★★★★ 2

  Cathy O'Donnell and Farley Granger, part one. A beautiful couple on the run, along the way learning, quite efficiently, to fool around some. A brilliant movie, completely underrated and nearly forgotten.

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  Review by Ethan Colburn ★★★★ 2

  Nicholas Ray gets better and better.

  Especially for a younger director, Ray really elevates this film adding a lot of character development in short amounts of time. I find his projects frequently involve interesting set-ups that he makes much more intense through his editing and shot choice.

  Farley Granger is great in this. Similar to Tony Curtis in the late 50s, Farley Granger seemed to have this very brief window of success in the late 40s and early 50s but the films he cranked out during this time were diverse and impressive. This is the first non-Hitchcock film I've seen of his but he is able to handle the romantic scenes just as well as the more thrilling scenes.

  Really thrilling film. Worth a watch!

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  Review by Sara Clements ★★★★

  ┏┓
  ┃┃╱╲ In this
  ┃╱╱╲╲ house
  ╱╱╭╮╲╲ we support
  ▔▏┗┛▕▔ bi king
  ╱▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔╲
  Farley Granger
  ╱╱┏┳┓╭╮┏┳┓ ╲╲
  ▔▏┗┻┛┃┃┗┻┛▕▔

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 4

  “They Live By Night” is “Bonnie and Clyde” for the soft boys and girls out there. 

  Less icy cool and more wide-eyed melodrama, director Nicholas Ray’s lovers on the run noir is an earnest early take on doomed amorous criminals. 

  The plot of “Night” - a cross-country manhunt for a former teenage con and his girlfriend - might seem like it would take more than a few pages from 30s gangster flicks. But Ray actually mines mostly from the deep well of the era’s weepies as inspiration. 

  In his directorial debut, Ray shows a sympathy for the hyper-emotive misunderstood juvenile delinquent — a sentiment most known from his later classic, “Rebel Without a Cause.” 

  Farley Granger is no James Dean…

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  Review by sher ★★★★ 3

  the names in this movie.... chickamaw? keechie? t-dub? are they jellicle cats

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  Review by Dragonknight ★★★½ 15

  Film #37 of Project 40

  ”You don't see me knitting anything. Do ya?”

  Nicholas Ray’s debut feature – as many critics have pointed out – is a front-runner in the “couple on the run” genre, it is a a finely balanced noir with elements of crime thrillers and gangster movies also featuring a very strong and elegant romance which softens some of the essential masculinity of the film and its sometimes violent subject matter. Ray always keeps the balance between the romantic and more thrilling parts of the story and quite effectively manages to integrate the poetic and subtle emotional relationship between the two main characters into the ominous and pretty much threatening atmosphere of the film. Like the protagonists…

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  Review by Cahiers Du Cinéma

  Paul and Virginie married at night...
  (Paul et Virginie se sont mariés la nuit... by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze - Cahiers du Cinema 5, September 1951)

  It's almost a cursed film. It was more or less banned in the United States and was only relatively successful when it was shown in England two years ago. It would have right at home at the "Cursed Film Festival" of 1949, but we didn't know about it at the time. The following year, it was presented at the "Rendez-vous de Biarritz" in front of a completely indifferent audience, which saw it only as an average gangster film; I saw it then for the third time. It struck me even more than during the previous visions,…