Point Blank

Point Blank is a 1967 crime film directed by John Boorman. It stars Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn, and Carroll O'Connor. It's a revenge movie with extra double-cross for good measure.

trailer:

The NYT closes with this:

But, holy smokes, what a candid and calculatedly sadistic film it is! What a sheer exercise in creeping menace and crashing violence for their surface shock effects! It evolves on a shadowy social level and develops no considerate moral sense. Mr. Marvin is out to get his money by hitting, cutting with bottles, dumping men off roofs, and shooting them—and he does. He is a thorough antihero, a killer who must kill or be killed.

This is not a pretty picture for the youngsters—or, indeed, for anyone with delicate taste.

Senses of Cinema opens by saying, "Point Blank has gradually become regarded as one of the seminal films of late 1960s American cinema" and particularly notes, "It is also amongst the two or three most indelible, precise and committed performances of Marvin’s career."

Empire Online gives it 5 stars. The Guardian says, "John Boorman's classic, disorienting thriller still has all the strange menace and cool intrigue it did in 1967".

Slant Magazine says, "What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman's virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism" and concludes, "after Boorman's Point Blank, noir would never be quite the same again."

It's included in the book 1,001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, which calls it "the perfect thriller". Roger Ebert says, "...as suspense thrillers go "Point Blank" is pretty good. It gets back into the groove of Hollywood thrillers". Rotten Tomatoes gives it a critics score of 97%.