Rent The Shanghai Gesture (1941)
3.4 of 5 from 55 ratings
1h 38min
A truly extraordinary, demented, delirious film. Aside from Lynch, Sternberg may be the best filmmaker at realising the quality of a nightmare on screen. The cutting between ever more dissolute and amoral characters exchanging enigmatic but unmistakably loaded glances is used to alternately erotic and sinister effect; the somnambulant pacing imbues events with an intoxicating air of fatalism, as if all the players in this murky, orientalist underworld are already members of the undead, doomed to enact their private obsessions to their undoing.