The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
Green Book
Widows
The Walking Dead
Log in with Facebook
OR
By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies, and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and Fandango.
Please enter your email address and we will email you a new password.
Critics Consensus: Featuring Robert Mitchum's formidable performance as a child-hunting preacher, The Night of the Hunter is a disturbing look at good and evil.
Critic Consensus: Featuring Robert Mitchum's formidable performance as a child-hunting preacher, The Night of the Hunter is a disturbing look at good and evil.
All Critics (65) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (64) | Rotten (1) | DVD (2)
One of the great movie horror tales, with one of the greatest of all movie villains.
A stunning piece of work, with the shadows of German expressionism and a compositional sense comparable to the work of George Stevens: it trumps its own noir cynicism with a thrilling and plausible idealism in the final moments.
It is a garish, unbelievable but fairly exciting nightmare.
Ultimately the source of its style and power is mysterious -- it is a film without precedents, and without any real equals
This start for Gregory as producer and Laughton as director is rich in promise but the completed product, bewitching at times, loses sustained drive via too many offbeat touches that have a misty effect.
All this has been crisply compacted into clear screen drama by the late James Agee and it is put forth under the direction of Mr. Laughton in stark, rigid visual terms.
The only film directed by actor Charles Laughton, this haunting masterpiece is simply one of the best horrors ever made.
A film might start out its life as trash, and somewhere over the course of time, become art, in the same fashion that a lump of coal subjected to time and pressure becomes a diamond.
A magnificent example of a movie doing what movies do best: capturing emotions on film and presenting a feverish, imaginative state with the tactile quality of the real.
It's overwrought and lurid; the story is grotesque and so are the characters. It's unlike anything else before and since. And that is why this strident psychological horror stands up now as one of the great pieces of American genre cinema.
Mitchum is a dreamily terrifying presence, partly because he's filmed in menacing silhouette a good quarter of the time.
Mitchum gives one of cinema's greatest performances as a demented man who's one part preacher, one part murderer, and totally determined to track down a stash of stolen loot in the possession of two kids.
Charles Laughton, the formidable British actor, after years in the trade, made one feature as a director and this is it, layered like a fat juicy onion. A criminal malcontent disguised as a preacher goes on the hunt for some stolen loot, killing all who stand in his way, and there's your plot, but along the way Laughton pauses to comment on many and various things, not the least of which is how a poetically told story resonates. Like maybe in the old silent films ... and there is where this simple tale takes joyous flight. Mitchum leads as the heavy, but there are many fine performances here. Shelley Winters, cast against type, is marvelous, and Lillian Gish ( in case you missed the homage to the silents) underlines the point. And, after all these years, still as vibrant a work.
Super Reviewer
This tense and bleak film noir, aesthetically mesmerizing and borrowing heavily from German Expressionism, is all the more surprising when you know that Laughton hated children - and while Mitchum is great as the expressionist villain, he seems though too one-dimensional to be truly menacing.
The very definition of a film noir. Robert Mitchum is spectacular as psychotic preacher and serial killer Harry Powell. Few films actually earn the title "edge of your seat" but this dark and incredibly well made film by first (and only) time director Charles Laughton will certainly have you gripping both seat handles in suspense.
A phony preacher infiltrates a family in order to find hidden money. I have trouble making sense of Charles Laughton's only directorial effort. On the one hand, the thrills - the film's construction as a suspense - is compelling and oftentimes frightening. The action sequences are well-choreographed, and the performance by Robert Mitchum makes the preacher seem like a predecessor of Hannibal Lector. On the other hand, there are clearly images of religious hypocrisy being deployed here, but there doesn't seem to be a coherent statement about faith's effects or faith as an affect. The foiling of Rachel Cooper and Harry Powell doesn't provide much insight about religion as a guise or a guide. Overall, as a surface thriller, this is quite good, but I think one of us - the film or me - is missing something deeper.
View All Quotes
View All