This taut crime picture was one of the earliest films in the career of Stanley Kubrick, but something of the director's voice and characteristic preoccupations are already evident here.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 5, 2015

Underneath The Killing's clockwork violence is a pungent layer of irony, something Kubrick would further explore many times later in his career.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 14, 2013

Faultless and enjoyable.

| Jun 24, 2013

Plotted with the kind of Swiss-watch precision and attention to detail that would eventually get Kubrick labeled Hollywood's most notorious perfectionist.

| Original Score: A | Aug 11, 2011

At 27 Writer-Director Stanley Kubrick, in his third full-length picture, has shown more audacity with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town on an exhibitors' poll.

| Aug 3, 2011

Even though he was just staring out, Kubrick instantly mastered the crime genre. A stunning film.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 3, 2007

[The film] at first tends to be somewhat confusing, soon settles into a tense and suspenseful vein which carries through to an unexpected and ironic windup.

| May 8, 2007

Arguably Stanley Kubrick's most perfectly conceived and executed film.

| May 8, 2007

Stanley Kubrick's masterful manipulation of chronology brings an excruciating sense of doom to The Killing, a classical noir about a carefully threaded heist unraveled by the scheming of a fiendish femme.

| May 1, 2006

Characteristically Kubrick in both its mechanistic coldness and its vision of human endeavour undone by greed and deceit, this noir-ish heist movie is nevertheless far more satisfying than most of his later work.

| Feb 9, 2006

An engrossing little adventure.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2000