Popular reviews

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  Review by Patrick Willems ★★★★½ 5

  Gonna start ending every conversation with “You’re dead son. Get yourself buried.”

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  Review by Timcop ★★★★★ 3

  Drinking game idea: Take a drink every time someone does or says something horrible.

  Spoiler alert: you're dead after 5 minutes.

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  Review by Rida ★★★★★ 25

  Sweet Smell of Success is one of those classic films that feel so startlingly contemporary that you can’t help but check and recheck the release date just to make sure that the black-and-white was a necessity rather than a stylistic choice. The actors speak in those movie accents, yes, and there’s a conspicuous lack of onscreen sex and language, but something about Sweet Smell of Success is so true and real that I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that it was released in 1957 and not last year.

  Everything is dark and nasty enough to make you feel like you’ve just witnessed something very wrong. At first it’s the usual rudeness and clever lines that characterize our…

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  Review by Matt Singer ★★★★½ 2

  "The cat's in the bag and the bag's in the river."

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 1

  "Don't you see that today that boy wiped his feet on the choice, on the predilections of sixty million men and women of the greatest country in the world. If you had any morals yourself, you would understand the immorality of that boy's stand today. It was not me he criticized - it was my readers."

  Is Burt Lancaster as JJ Hunsecker low-key one of the most evil characters in movie history? Sources say: Yes. It's not just his barely contained incestuous designs on his sister, the leering menace punctuating every single word he says, or his red-baiting scandal mongering for the right-wing press, but rather the contempt with which he treats Tony Curtis’ Sidney Falco. Hunsecker is constantly berating…

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  Review by brendan o'hare ★★★★½ 2

  There are two separate instances in this where someone compares someone else to a pretzel as an insult

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  Review by sydney ★★★★★ 1

  J.J. lords over everything, his face almost always in shadow and glasses cover his eyes. Sidney lurks in the background, wringing shaky hands. And the city like a prison, a dungeon. An edge of your seat thriller with no action or mystery beyond who's going to get destroyed next, every line of breathtaking dialogue a cobra strike. Everyone's a maniac of the most terrifying type - the smart, the calculating. Newspaper-wise, makes ACE IN THE HOLE look downright friendly. Why did this movie have to end?

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  Review by sydney lou who ★★★★★ 6

  the eternal struggle between an absolute power top and a bottom who thinks he's a top

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  Review by liam f ★★★★½ 1

  you ever watch a film with dialogue so sharp that you have to periodically check your ears to make sure they're not bleeding

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★★ 43

  "I'd hate to take a bite outta you; you're a cookie full of arsenic."

  With Sweet Smell of Success, his first stab at Hollywood filmmaking after a decade spent unhappily in the British film industry, American-Scottish director Alexander Mackendrick came away with a genuine classic, though unfortunately this was not reflected in its meager box-office performance at the time. Its inauspicious reception did little for the director who remained a journeyman throughout his troubled career.

  Human cockroach Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) serves as a press agent for an ever-dwindling roster of third-tier entertainers who grow progressively frustrated over his inability to put their names in bright lights (or at the very least in the sordid newspaper columns that serve as…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★

  There is very little debate that the strength of the screenplay and it's dialogue propels an abundance of the drama in this film noir; almost every line is a treasure, and Burt Lancaster delivers the highest number of the more memorable ones. It's adapted from a short story by Ernest Lehman and is directed by Alexander Mackendrick (Whisky Galore!) with the character of J.J. Hunsecker purportedly being founded on distinguished New York columnist Walter Winchell.

  Sweet Smell of Success is furthermore an extraordinary accomplishment in visual storytelling, with a world carved out verging on the perimeters of surrealism. Tony Curtis also provides some beautiful moments together with some quotable lines, and his corrupt schemes procure an extraordinary representation of the sordid and immoral realm of press agents during the hard bop jazz era in New York City and spotlights Lancaster and Curtis at the pinnacles of their capacities as actors.

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  Review by Jonathan White ★★★★½

  What makes Sweet Smell of Success so delectably odoriferous is the fact that, in reality, it’s protagonist free; simply two fetid antagonists playing each other for their own personal gain. The other characters nothing but pawns. Star crossed lovers? We don’t give a damn for them, we only care if underdog Curtis will manage to out-flank the powerful and smug Lancaster, or be squashed trying.

  Both Curtis, playing the slimy press agent Sidney Falco and Lancaster as the mercurial and vengeful newspaper columnist J.J. Hunsecker play against type, and while I found that extremely compelling, apparently audiences of the day did not. They wanted the boyishly charming good guy and the man of action, not a dialogue heavy noir drama.…