Although shot on an extremely tight schedule, it exudes a palpable sense of menace and sadism that dovetails powerfully with its depiction of widespread corruption.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 26, 2025

The cruel inevitability makes all that follows something that we must accept because this is now a world devoid of hope and barely holding on to something resembling a conscience.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2025

Grahame, combining acerbic wit and protective vanity with a self-reflexive attitude, kills as Debby...The character breaks new cinematic femme-fatale ground in her thirst for revenge.. It’s a fearless performance. One for the books.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 15, 2025

The Big Heat is a feast of resonant, unsentimental terseness.

Full Review | Jul 3, 2025

A brutal bit of film noir.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 21, 2024

The Big Heat is a pessimistic, mordacious, even feral film in the late style of the great director...

Full Review | Jul 4, 2024

Above all, it is directed with a dramatic incisiveness, a sharp-edged observation that keeps the pitch of interest and excitement continuously high.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

It has the kind of socko that will lies behind a good many small items in the newspapers and behind the big stories that make the evil deeds of the Medicis amateurish and simple in comparison.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

Ford has seldom been seen to better advantage than as Bannion... Miss Grahame adds another fine performance to those that already stand to her credit; while Scourby, Marvin and Adam Williams create genuinely terrifying portraits of beasts of prey.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

One of the best produced crime melodramas to have come out of Hollywood in some time. It is taut and exciting, and the direction and acting are so skillful that one is made to feel as if present at a real-life occurrence.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

[The Big Heat] has Gloria Grahame in so amazing a performance as a gun moll that if you miss going down to see her, boy, oh boy, you are cheating yourself.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

The characters seem to be wrapped thinly around steaming amounts of vengeance, avarice, or cruelty, but Marvin and Ford make it a well-acted movie that offers interesting impressions of how a practical-minded American male operates in crises

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

Columbia Pictures has brought a truly big league story to the screen, with some of the most creditable casting we've ever seen... The Big Heat is a "sleeper" in every sense of the word. Don't miss It!

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

Much of this credit for a story well-told goes to Glenn Ford as the honest cop who pays a great price for his refusal to knuckleunder, and to Gloria Grahame, who scores an acting triumph again in a role of the gangster moll -- who also pays a great price.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

The action is fast, [and] the work of both Ford and Gloria Grahame... are of top excellence.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

The Big Heat keeps moving from start to finish. There are no lags in the action, but curiously, almost no suspense.... There's an impersonal newspaper reportorial style about it which makes it temporarily believable.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

All the characters are pretty vivid, especially Gloria Grahame as the shady lady, and all benefit from situations stressing realism rather than the usual heroics. A really swift ride from start to finish.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

Although the studio has not gambled on slowing up the action by attempting anything profound in the way of character building, performances are so good and the settings so effective that everybody in the cast is unmistakably tagged for what he is.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 11, 2024

Fritz Lang, a masterful crime violence and mob-psychology specialist for a couple of decades (M and Fury), gives his sure timing to the ambushing, skull-cracking and assorted shooting.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024

The Big Heat is a pretty rough cinematic journey, but for those who like this kind of going the film, packs a big, brutal wallop.

Full Review | Apr 11, 2024