Having the Touch of Evil envisioned by our most creative filmmaker, is a wondrous gift no movie lover should miss.

[Welles'] scenes with brothel-keeper Marlene Dietrich have nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with the rotting heart of this amazing fable: the apotheosis of pulp.

Indeed, just to see and hear the extraordinary 3 minute and 20 second opening sequence -- a fluid tour de force tracking shot -- without impediment of opening credits and street-sound-masking movie score is accomplishment enough.

Orson Welles' masterwork of greed, treachery and revenge.

Only the elegiac Magnificent Ambersons has such a powerful, all-pervading atmosphere as Touch of Evil...

Welles once fought in a bullring in Spain during his youth. In "Touch of Evil," Welles kills the metaphorical bull.

Even 50 years after studio heads lost patience and dumped it onto the bottom half of double bills, the final Hollywood film from Orson Welles is the opposite of ordinary.

Delightfully entertaining to watch, it is filled with interesting characters and it is playfully irreverent.

When druggies stash Leigh in a hotel room and throw a party, the movie threatens to turn into Reefer Madness, albeit with the visual panache of Citizen Kane.

It is a testament to Welles' genius that he was able to turn a piece of pulp literature into such a disturbing, sophisticated and, above all, entertaining study of depravity.

One of Welles masterpieces (his first American film in years), this noir thriller of drugs and corruption served as reminder to Hollywood what a brilliant artist he was, using film as vibrant form in its own right, not as extension of drama or literature

...Welles' baroque border-town murder mystery is a wild masterpiece, a sleazy, grimy, jittery, and ultimately dazzling work of cinematic magic.

A cinematic masterpiece and arguably the last great film noir.

I first saw it when I was 14 and thought it was one of the worst pictures ever -- garish, oppressive, and appallingly overacted. Grown up, I'd go with those same adjectives, except now I think it's one of the best.

A sweaty thriller conundrum on character and corruption, justice and the law, worship and betrayal, it plays havoc with moral ambiguities.

Where Mr. Welles soundly succeeds is in generating enough sinister electricity for three such yarns and in generally staging it like a wild, murky nightmare.