What Killing lacks in celebrity sparkle, it compensates for in raw ambition and rude chills.

| Sep 5, 2018

| Original Score: C | Sep 7, 2011

| Original Score: C | Apr 12, 2011

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 4, 2011

A well-researched docudrama on the twisted mind of the 25-year-old Mark David Chapman, the nobody who killed John Lennon.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 15, 2009

As the narrative lugubriously sticks to the documented events, we are served nothing more than a filmed transcript.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 21, 2008

It's well-constructed and acted, but mainly just left me feeling like I needed a shower after an exercise in voyeurism surrounding an event that's still hard to watch.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 21, 2008

Gets inside Chapman's head but never under his skin.

| Feb 15, 2008

Fastidiously researched, dubiously suspenseful character portrait is unable to salvage a lick of hindsight from the tragedy beyond "murderous narcissists are people too."

| Feb 15, 2008

Despite its vivid and imaginative style, The Killing of John Lennon is tough slogging for its nearly two-hour running time.

| Jan 7, 2008

Even if you can forgive [director] Piddington's mangling of the basics, you will find it hard to overlook his frantic use of slo-mo, a wobbly camera, freeze frames, double exposures and a close-up of a single eye.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 4, 2008

Though the psychic space Piddington and Ball create is certainly a terrifyingly claustrophobic place to be, it's also stultifying and banal in the way other people's crazed obsessions become after a very short while.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 4, 2008

The only revelations in The Killing of John Lennon are those we could have picked up ourselves, assuming we cared enough to do so.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 3, 2008

Only slightly better than Chapter 27, it's questionable whether even the most morbidly curious John Lennon fan might have any interest in sitting through nearly two hours of this creepy lunatic.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Jan 3, 2008

[W]e have only the perspective of a madman here, and it is no more enlightening than the ramblings of any given violent schizophrenic or criminal psychotic.

| Jan 2, 2008

Who is the audience here, besides depraved Beatles completists?

| Jan 2, 2008

Unlike Chapman, The Killing of John Lennon is no phony.

Full Review | Jan 2, 2008

Piddington does a beautiful balancing act, creating a movie that works both on the level of suspense and as a detailed factual chronicle.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 2, 2008

Andrew Piddington's devastating re-enactment of events leading up to, including and immediately after the murder is taken from interviews, depositions and court transcripts.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 2, 2008

Piddington never dares to diagnose Chapman's rage, settling for Wikipedia-style objectivity dressed in the more fatuous-than-provocative manner of Robinson Devor's Zoo.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 26, 2007