Stanley Kubrick: Ranking His Films From Worst To Best

The Killing is a 1956 black and white noir that follows a veteran criminal planning one last heist before settling down to marry his fiancée. This film features a rare for the time plot, full of flashbacks and nonlinear forward and backwards storytelling, which is all narrated by the harsh-tonged novelist Jim Thompson. The ending has the wonderful noir cynicism that you'd expect for a feature of this period and really deserves a revisit even to this day.

Unlike his work on previous films, Kubrick really pulls The Killing out the bag and it launched the young director into reasonable success and notoriety at the age of 28. The film has some big fans. Quentin Tarantino, most notably, pointed to The Killing as his biggest influence when making Reservoir Dogs.