Popular reviews

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  Review by noen ★★½

  Ed mobely: you know, you have very nice legs.
  Nancy liggett: aren't you sweet.
  Ed mobely: nice stockings too. What holds your stockings up?
  Nancy liggett: there's a lot your mother should have told you.
  Ed mobely: I didn't ask my mother. I asked you.

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  "While the City Sleeps" tinha o potencial de ser um filme intrigante, mas, infelizmente, não consegue atender às expectativas. Dirigido por Fritz Lang, o filme fica vago em vários aspectos, deixando os espectadores querendo mais.

  O filme gira em torno de jornalistas tentando capturar um serial killer, não…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★ 11

  Forget the serial murderer, While the City Sleeps is a movie about desire. Carnal desire, professional desire, desire for power. It's a sleazy, desperate stew of need, the intensity of which flags only when the film's lazily drawn killer — the one who most badly needs attention, who craves authority — takes center stage.

  Writer and TV newsman Ed Mobley (Dana Andrews) is notoriously lacking in ambition. Instead, he's driven by his need for physical sensation. Often, he finds it in the bottom of a liquor bottle, but it also resides in his sweet, willing fiancée Nancy (Sally Forrest) who lets him kiss her but, until recently, seems to have refused to allow him to go much further. And it's…

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  Review by Mandrakegray ★★★★ 5

  "Faithful as the day is long."
  "Mmmmm...that's the shortest day of the year."

  What a damn good movie, and what a cast! Still relevant...it joins "Ace In The Hole" and "A Face In The Crowd" as another film from the 50's that takes a prescient and coldly cynical take on how the media operates.

  This suspenseful melodrama details the actions of competing newspaper men (working for the same paper) trying to land the scoop on who's behind the mysterious "Lipstick Killer" murders. Morally questionable manipulations and ethical dilemmas arise from the desire to climb the paper's corporate ladder.

  Lang gives us a tale in which the main character we're (supposed to be) rooting for couldn't be more flawed. Edward Mobley…

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  Review by kmeaston ★★★½

  Further proof that if you give a guy a comic book called The Strangler, it's just a matter of time before he starts strangling people.

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  Review by Jesse Snoddon ★★★½ 2

  "I wonder what the nice people are doing tonight?"

  [Mild spoilers might pop up ahead]

  The Lipstick Killer (John Drew Barrymore) stalks the city! Amidst the killing spree, a news mogul dies and his empire passes into the hands of his unlikeable son Walter Kyne (Vincent Price), who pits three senior employees, Mark Loving (George Sanders), John Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell) and Harry Kritzer (James Craig) against one another for a promotion. Whoever can get the scoop on the killer first wins. Stuck in the middle of it all is Edward Mobley (Dana Andrews) a down to earth journalist who still believes his profession should still integrity over careerism but is slowly realizing the industry just doesn't work that way…

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  Review by Blake Bergman "Various Spaghetti" ★★★★

  "While the City Sleeps" is a 1956 film noir directed by Fritz Lang. Directed substantially later on within his expansive career, Lang had already set numerous standards both within the noir driven genre as well as film in general, spanning from the silent era to well into the studio era of the 50's and capping of in 1960. As much of some of his other films are essential viewing for those who are getting into film, I found "While the City Sleeps" is a great lesser-known film within his later studio filmography that really holds up in application. Most of Lang's later career was centered around producing film noirs in which he greatly excelled at, but increasingly became more and…

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  Review by migblah ★★★★★

  Habitualmente oscurecida por la mayor fama de la otra película de Lang de 1956 (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, elevada -merecidamente- al olimpo gracias a un gran texto de Jacques Rivette), While City Sleeps se puede considerar la coda final, el compendio de todos los logros alcanzados por el cineasta alemán en Hollywood, en los veinte años en los que estuvo dirigiendo films en la meca del cine. Aunque Beyond a Reasonable Doubt es una obra mayor, es una obra más conceptual, más centrada en su gimmick narrativo, aunque se extiende hacia lo que realmente siempre interesó a Lang: el hombre contra sus circunstancias, la condena inevitable... Pero en While the City Sleeps, todo avanza de forma más dulce, más sutil,…

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  Review by DallasFrance ★★★½

  Amazing cast, but it’s an ambitious film where almost every element juuuust misses the mark.

  -Dana Andrew’s character is somehow both Walter Cronkite and Al Pacino’s character in Heat. Just saving America on the boob tube one minute, then throwing on my cape for some subterranean criminal chasing the next.

  -The killer is over-acted and nonsensically developed (for his next trick: DAY TIME! how bout…in five minutes)

  -The three newsmen angling for the prime gig are cartoonishly obsessed and scheming. Three great actors just become MORALITY THEME vessels.

  -The main relationship goes through four major phases in about fourteen hours. And they kiss like two semi trucks going ninety miles an hour crashing into each other.

  -Vincent Price as the spoiled son inheriting the newspaper is idiotic, enabled, and gullible.

  Well, putting on the Fritz was getting a little Lang in the tooth… It’s a fun movie. Just be ready for some goofiness.

  
  Fritz Lang Ranked

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  Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★★ 1

  Um tipo de espectador - politizado, se assim quiserem - bastante esquemático, dois tipos de filmes - políticos, se assim quiserem - bastante esquemáticos, bastante dependentes de maniqueísmos (essa ideia de "o filme só é bom se for ambíguo, se apresentar fissuras" é uma das maiores picaretagens do mundo; a ideia do bem engendrar o mal, do repulsivo nascer do atraente e vice-versa é uma ideia totalmente dependente de um maniqueísmo de base):

  o filme que o espectador admite (ainda que não tenha consciência disso) precisamente porque é capaz de se identificar com os valores das personagens, que por sua vez definem as suas ações;

  o filme que o espectador rejeita (ainda que não tenha consciência disso) precisamente porque é…

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  Review by RanchoTuVu ★★★★½ 1

  Fritz Lang used a cardboard mockup of the New York skyline for the background for the opening credits which kind of sets the stage for the style of this movie about a competition between three executives at a media conglomerate to reveal the identity of the Lipstick Killer, a serial killer targeting young single women in New York. The film kind of disguises how good it really is at showing that intersection where a thriller and a sharp drama full of cynical observations come together. It mostly features Dana Andrews in full bar mode drinking with the likes of Ida Lupino and Thomas Mitchell, while Vincent Price runs a media conglomerate married to Rhonda Fleming. He's Price-less in this, one of his better parts in his pre-Corman era. The sharp pace, social commentary, and humor are first rate while it sets up the Lipstick Killer part which, along with that cardboard skyline, is kind of like "M" meeting "Metropolis".

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★

  Noirvember

  While the City Sleeps tries to be a noir that mixes in social commentary about the media, but it's a rather mixed film overall. The film centres on journalists racing to solve a murder case, or at least find out juicy details, in a competition designed by the ruthless owner of a newspaper business who is looking to find someone to run his newspaper. Vincent Price plays the idiotic owner, one of his many great supporting roles in from the film noir era. While the City Sleeps is a rather silly story, without characters that have any sort of reality to them. The villain is almost cartoonish. Characters confidently state some absurd facts about human psychology, which are the…

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  Review by Gregory Kent ★★★★ 2

  1956 Ranked
  Physically Owned Films

  Really good stuff. Procedural, but from a media perspective as opposed to a police perspective. Some interesting drama, some solid suspense, and a whole lot of commentary on the media and how it is changing - well before newspapers truly died. Absolutely stacked cast and solid Fritz Lang direction.