Le Cercle Rouge (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)

The Red Circle sees Alain Delon reunited again with Melville, as a man freshly out of jail taking on a diamond heist. The realisation is slow and collected, and this generates an impressive level of tension, despite some seriously tedious longueurs in the mechanical set pieces of getting from A to B, which is then let down for once and for all by the rushed denouement. The detail is great, as is the doing away with surplus dialogue and the overall laconicism, but you expect much more at the end.

6/10