"One of the greatest urban crime films ever made. The first hour takes place in an industrialist’s living room, with huge picture windows that look over the city without seeing it, yet Kurosawa’s camera work is so deft and inventive you never feel the constriction—only pummeling suspense and a moral quandary. Toshiro Mifune plays coat-and-tie decency as well as he does his wild men, and Kurosawa descends into the lower depths with blinding clarity."

"Charles Laughton’s only film as director, scripted by James Agee from the book by Davis Grubb. It’s a fairy-tale version of a crime-suspense drama, as two children are pursued through a magical, haunted landscape by a demented yet canny preacher (Robert Mitchum). There’s a grown-up story about a stash of stolen money, but Laughton’s masterstroke is to ignore that and present the human monster from the children’s point of view, as a remorseless bogeyman."