has all its power. It hasn't aged because Wilder and his co-writers, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels, were so lean and mean [with their dialogue]... [Kirk Douglas'] focus and energy... is almost scary. There is nothing dated about [his] performance. It's as right-now as a sharpened knife." Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader called it "cold, lurid, and fascinating" and Nathan Lee of The Village Voice wrote, "Here is, half a century out of the past, a movie so acidly au courant it stings." Time Out London wrote, "As a diatribe against all that is worst in human nature, it has moments dipped in pure vitriol." TV Guide called it "a searing example of writer-director Billy Wilder at his most brilliantly misanthropic" and adds, "An uncompromising portrait of human nature at its worst, the film... stands as one of the great American films of the 1950s." Ed Gonzalez of Slant wrote that the film "... allowed Wilder to question the very nature of human interest stories and the twisted relationship between the American media and its public. More than 50 years after the film's release, when magazines compete to come up with the cattiest buzz terms and giddily celebrate the demise of celebrity relationships for buffo bucks, Ace in the Hole feels more relevant than ever." In his Slate review, Jack Shafer wrote in 2007: "If film noir illustrates the crackup of the American dream... Ace in the Hole is an exemplar of the form." The film was included in film critic Roger Ebert's list of "The Great Movies" in 2001. In September 2008, Empire published its list of the Top 500 greatest movies of all time. With votes from 10,000 readers of the magazine along with 500 key film critics and 150 film industry figures, this film is ranked number 385. In 2015, the film ranked 100th on BBC's "100 Greatest American Films" list, voted on by film critics from around the world. In 2022, Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, in a Facebook "Noir or Not" segment stated that Ace in the Hole incorrectly gets labeled as a film noir because of director Wilder's other films Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), and because of the cynical storyline. Muller feels that Ace in the Hole is without many of the characteristics normally associated with film noir, and that it is more of a