With a moral authority as commanding as his technical precision, the young Stanley Kubrick delivers a devastating anti-war polemic with this early WWI-set masterwork. The film’s relentlessly staged tracking shots through no-man’s-land pandemonium rank among the director’s most visceral set pieces.

Assembled with the exquisite precision of a master watchmaker, Stanley Kubrick’s tightly wound heist thriller elevates its genre with characteristic ingenuity. Considered by the director to be his first signature film, The Killing counts Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan among its devotees.