The Killing

Director: Stanley Kubrick

1956 / 85min / DCP

The 28-year-old Kubrick’s first film with a certifiable star—looming lead lug Sterling Hayden, fronting an ensemble of desperate, lumpy-visaged characters, including the livewire Timothy Carey—is a late, great entry in the noir canon, with Kubrick and hard-boiled author extraordinaire Jim Thompson adapting Lionel White’s pulp novel, filtered through an ingeniously fractured flashback structure. Electric, pulse-pounding filmmaking from infamous perfectionist Kubrick, and a control freak’s nightmare vision of how even the best-laid plans can come undone because of human frailty.