Critic Reviews

Orson Welles was so taken with this film that after seeing it he declared Kubrick could do no wrong; not to be missed.

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

As good as the story and direction are, though, the true strength of The Killing lies in the characters and characterizations.

Stanley Kubrick was always infatuated with human clockwork, both in terms of what makes each of us tick and how we choreograph our lives, deaths, and sins. The Killing, his big heist movie, suits this obsession perfectly. It is often considered, and rightly, his first masterpiece.

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

The word that occurs to me in describing Kubrick's approach to Johnny and the film, is "control." That may suggest the link between this first mature feature and Kubrick's later films, so varied and brilliant.

From the heroes’ complicated planning to the story’s cruel twist ending, The Killing illustrates how human beings have a bad habit of getting in their own way.

One of the great devils of 1950s American cinema.

Forty years later, The Killing has lost little of its punch. It's both vintage '50s noir and a stunning introduction to a killer director. [22 Jul 1998, p.L]

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, due both to a lack of bombastic pretensions and to the style fitting the subject matter.