Melville seems to peer out from behind the camera with a reassuring wink and nod. Le Cercle Rouge is the most self-consciously cool of his famously underheated films noirs.
Le Cercle Rouge(Le Cercle rouge)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France, Italy · 1970
Rated R · 2h 20m
Director Jean-Pierre Melville
Starring Alain Delon, Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonté, Yves Montand
Genre Crime, Drama, Thriller
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Corey has just been released from prison and doesn't plan on going back any time soon. But his plans to leave his criminal past behind are upended when he gets sucked into a jewel heist orchestrated by Vogel, a fugitive murderer.
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What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Chicago Reader by Bill Stamets
Key action points are edited with finesse, but the denouement, with its dutiful hail of gunfire, is heartless and mechanical.
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
A glistening gem among caper movies, this impeccably elegant jewel-heist drama takes its title from Buddhist lore, its cast from France's great gallery of leading men, and its style from the unique blend of cinematic savoir-faire and brooding existential angst.
Washington Post by Desson Thomson
For students of cool ... Le Cercle Rouge is required viewing.
A work of leisurely development and tragic inevitability.
New York Daily News by Jack Mathews
If you've got the patience, this is still one of the all-time exercises in cinematic cool.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
Watching Le Cercle Rouge, we're caught up in a world that, however improbable some of its twists and turns seem, strikes us as a perfect, imaginative creation.
New York Magazine (Vulture) by Peter Rainer
At its best, the film compares favorably to its obvious antecedents, "Rififi" (which Melville once hoped to direct) and "The Asphalt Jungle."
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
There is one cool, understated scene after another.
For some of us, this constitutes a religious event.
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