An enigmatic hitman follows a strict, ritualistic routine before assassinating a nightclub owner. But after the job is done, things take a turn when he’s spotted by a witness and finds himself hunted by both the police and a rival group of assassins. Jean-Pierre Melville’s crime thriller is a sleek, stylised masterpiece – a razor-sharp fusion of 1940s American gangster noir, 1960s French pop culture, and the cool detachment of Japanese lone-warrior legends.

Reviews

‘This is a great movie, an austere masterpiece, with Delon as a cold, enigmatic contract killer who lives by a personal code of bushido.’
Time Out

‘[Melville’s] style remains haunting and elegantly spare, just right for the kind of hit man who lives in silence, in bare and colorless surroundings, with a lonely caged bird.’
Janet Maslin, The New York Times