Killing Them Softly Reviews

Andrew Dominik's Killing Them Softly is a potent and miraculously-shot film that captures America's recent financial collapse through a criminal lens.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5

A noir-ish crime drama with a brain, and despite its flaws and inconsistencies, a film worth seeing. Dominik remains a filmmaker to watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 72/100

Complex and problematic in a rather wonderful way, Killing Them Softly has flaws more interesting than some film's perfections.

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Brad Pitt excels amongst an incredible ensemble cast in this gritty crime thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

There are many cinematic cardinal sins, but the latest film from Aussie director Andrew Dominik commits two of the big ones - Don't Be Boring and Don't Waste A Great Cast.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

A top-notch, viscerally powerfully mobster movie with a view of free-market enterprise as practiced at its most harrowingly basic, last-man-standing level.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Australian director Andrew Dominik mixes conventional mobster mayhem with an unconventional take on gangsters caught up in the Great Recession. And with Brad Pitt as his ideologically enraged male muse hitman, as if wandering in from Occupy Wall Street.

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While Dominik flourishes when it comes to the picture's excessive violence, he seems to be unable to balance those sequences with the drawn-out scenes of dialogue, which, while delivered nicely, kill any momentum the film might have had.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Good actors and unimpeachable source material hampered by faulty chatter, leading to thumb-twiddling.

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Director Andrew Dominik controls the clock

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Weary and familiar foray in to gangster turf

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It's a rollercoaster: long talky tete a tetes, punctuated with shocking violence (both of which are masterfully presented).

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Killing Them Softly finds its own rhythm and eventually its own way of building dread, punctuated by bravura cinematic moments that won't soon be forgotten

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

The completely obvious comparison to the mobster world and our American economic system is a welcome, straight-forward surprise for storytelling.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10

The pace is deliberate, yet that simmering sociopolitical undercurrent gives Killing Them Softly more weight than its rather conventional concept might suggest.

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Jackie Cogan understands his fate in a way that the other smart guys don't quite, an understanding that makes him seem somehow smarter.

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Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt) understands his fate in a way that the other smart guys don't quite, an understanding that makes him seem somehow smarter.

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Killing Them Softly positions itself as a heady piece of entertainment, but it's ultimately no more intelligent than The Pet Goat.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

It's a pleasure to watch Pitt work in dialogue-rich, subversively comic film noir.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Another one of those films that makes you wish Quentin Tarantino had taken up hotel and restaurant management.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4