The Criterion Collection

“If film noir were to be forgotten, Robert Aldrich’s frenzied 1955 masterwork, Kiss Me Deadly, might serve as the supreme reminder of what the genre had been,” writes Richard Brody in a New Yorker review of the film’s new Criterion DVD and Blu-ray release. “It pungently distills the genre’s crucial themes—the sex, violence, solitude, and paranoia boiling silently beneath the iconography of the modern American landscape.” For the Baltimore Sun’s Michael Sragow, Aldrich’s take on detective Mike Hammer is “a blistering swipe at the fifties American male.” Sragow explains: “In a pulp masterstroke, this brute in a suit who knows all the angles lands in a realm where brawn and knowingness don't matter: the world of atomic power.”

Other critics are also exploding with praise: DVD Town’s Christopher Long calls Kiss Me Deadly “one of the greatest and strangest and harshest of all films noir,” adding that “it was startling in its time and is startling today.” Home Theater Forum’s Matt Hough writes that it’s “a breathless film masterfully directed.” “Jarringly hard-boiled and filled with atom-age paranoia, it still knocks you silly,” exclaims Paper’s Dennis Dermody. According to the Very Short List folks, it’s “not to be missed . . . A brutal, brilliant film noir that set the high-water mark for cold war paranoia.” And Slant’s Glenn Heath Jr. deems it “a savage film noir masterpiece.”