The book was cool, long and absorbing; the film is overheated, not so long as films go these days, and decidedly dull.

| May 1, 2024

I consider this piece of glamourised violence to be one of the most appalling degradations of human ingenuity I have seen either in or out of the cinema.

| May 1, 2024

I fear director Brooks has tried too hard for authentic effect. His film is too low-key. Too black to look at, with no relieving sharpness.

| May 1, 2024

Brooks, with a close look at documentary and the common elements of police drama, processes the meticulous reconstruction of a homicide. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 28, 2023

In Cold Blood, designed to disturb, reassures, designed to bewilder, dots every i (and uses a hammer to do it).

| Oct 4, 2023

This odd sense of detachment marks Richard Brooks film out from the pack. That and Blakes wide-eyed and anxious performance, which really takes the viewer through a gamut of emotions.

| Mar 31, 2022

A film that grips right from the beginning with its noirish visuals and unmistakable sense of menace.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 13, 2021

In the end, one is left, not with a work of art, not with a document but with a cliché. It is an inadequate monument, even to a pair of stupid criminals.

| Feb 10, 2021

There's a pitiable desperation in their meandering spree of destruction, as if they're perpetually lost in an escalating hell of their own making.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 24, 2020

In Cold Blood is a somber, slablike, all-of-a-piece inclemency that bears little resemblance to the open, cheap-knit style of Capote's writing.

| Jun 19, 2019

Like another great crime story rooted in truth, Dead Man Walking, it refuses to depersonalize the victims or elide their suffering

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 14, 2019

By the end, the film has parted company altogether with Capote's cold detachment, and in doing so underlined the rightness of the book's method. Brooks lingers with rather ghoulish concern.

| Jul 6, 2018

The movie seems perfunctory, as if Brooks did not really direct it, but only organized it.

| Mar 13, 2018

Visually striking, with two astonishing lead performances, but it never quite plumbs the emotional depths of the Truman Capote source material.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 1, 2016

Chief among the film's distinctions are the beautiful gloom of Conrad Hall's monochromatic cinematography... There are the fearless, wonderfully contrasting performances by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson as the sociopathic killers.

| Dec 3, 2015

Writer-director Richard Brooks' detached style allows for a non-exploitative presentation, and the contributions by cinematographer Conrad Hall and composer Quincy Jones are first-rate.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 28, 2015

It's both a "true crime" movie and a poetic account of two young men who, by committing an act of unspeakable brutality, unleash the furies against themselves.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 11, 2015

Blake and Wilson give wonderfully natural performances: eerie in their casual attitude to murder but endearing in their open natures. In Cold Blood doesn't judge them but doesn't excuse them.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2015

Truman Capote's non-fiction masterwork gets the film noir treatment from director Richard Brooks, with a slow dissection of "a crime that shocked a nation."

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2015

Capote's non-fiction novel brooded on the sheer pointless nightmare, and so does the film, to some extent; the killers' casual excitement at the prospect of murderous violence is still chilling.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 10, 2015