Prizzi's Honor (1985)

Huston shapes the story into a resoundingly comic love story with sobering underpinnings, imagining The Maltese Falcon set in Brooklyn and done like an Italian opera. It is a rich, dense character comedy with an unblinking eye at love and family loyalty, Sicilian style.

The critic calls it one of Huston's very best films, a bizarre dark comedy where two professional killers fall in love and find the mob isn't big enough for both. The plot's logical collision of romance and family honor makes shocking decisions feel inevitable.

The picture revels in the murderous finagling of a Brooklyn Mafia family with a daring comic tone like The Godfather acted by The Munsters, using Italian opera arias to point up their sentimentality. Its elation and springiness make it feel like the work of a young director.

The critic finds the film a stylish black comedy about a hit man and assassin whose romance turns deadly. Huston is praised for expertly blending tones including irony and camp into a coherent narrative focused on faces talking in rooms.

John Huston's film packs love, sex, murder and dark comedy into a labyrinthine tale of a hit man who falls for a woman who turns out to be his counterpart in hired killings. Nicholson convincingly stretches into a street-tough accented gangster role while Turner jolts with her loveliness in key scenes.

The critic describes it as a slight but grimly amusing Mafia spoof with Jack Nicholson as a not-overbright mob hitman. It is enjoyable overall but not one of Nicholson's best performances.

Huston's black comedy walks a narrow tightrope between funny and serious as a stolid Mafia hit man falls for a glamorous fellow professional killer. The film captures the book's unique quality of being not just one thing.