The Killers (1995)

Of the five quintessential noirs Universal just released on tape — including Fritz Lang's You and Me and Ministry of Fear, the perverse Phantom Lady, and the tricky Black Angel — the best and blackest is The Killers. Using the eponymous Hemingway story as a launching pad, director Robert Siodmak and cowriters Anthony Veiller and John Huston (uncredited) blast into hard-boiled atmospherics: An insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien, Bogart manque) pries into the death of the Swede (Burt Lancaster), an ex-boxer, ex-con, and ex-beau of the shifty Kitty (Ava Gardner, sublimely feline). You get so caught up watching the Swede's gang pull a heist — and the double-crosses unfold in deep focus and Wellesian flashback — that the whodunit problem sneaks up from behind. And Lancaster, in his screen debut, plays a non-contender so deeply doomed that he makes De Niro's Jake La Motta look like a giddy Rocky Balboa. A-