A favourite of directors as different as John Woo (who called it “the closest thing to a perfect movie I have ever seen”) and Fassbinder (who paid lavish homage to it in his Love Is Colder than Death), Le Samourai is now widely considered the greatest achievement of Melville’s late period. Alain Delon, a walking semiotic system in trenchcoat and fedora, plays “le samourai,” a contract killer who performs his executions with meticulous care. (The film was called Ice-Cold Angel in parts of Europe.) Bressonian in its sense of ritualized gesture, its precision, its use of sound (and silence) and non-expressive acting, Le Samourai features many celebrated set pieces, the chase in the Paris Metro in particular; but it is in the still passages, the temps morts, between these that it reaches its real intensity. “A masterpiece of French noir” (David Thomson). “Alain Delon in his finest performance” (Sight & Sound).