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

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

A probing, sensitive, tasteful, balanced and suspenseful documentary-drama.

| Apr 8, 2008

Hall's bleak vision, his gift for working with darkness and rain, rivals classic film noir of the 1940s and '50s in its visual mastery.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 2, 2006

In contrast to Capote, whose obsessive documentation of the pair's every act betrays his fear than he (and his readers) could well do something similar, Brooks explains and sympathises away their act as being unique to them.

| Feb 9, 2006

Excellent quasidocumentary, which sends shivers down the spine while moving the viewer to ponder.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 20, 2003

Brooks' great achievement in the film is to portray Smith and Hickock as the unexceptional, dim-witted, morally adrift losers they were.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 18, 2002

An uneasy mixture of facile Freudianism and 40s expressionism.

| Jan 1, 2000