This docudrama recreates a real life crime in which an entire family was brutally murdered by wandering gunmen. While on the run, the gunmen face not only the realities of their terrible crime but also their own earthly impermanence.
23 August 1903, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
29 January 1918, Penn's Grove, New Jersey, USA
29 April 1943, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA
13 March 1908, New York City, New York, USA
6 May 1942, Helena, Georgia, USA
1 February 1934, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
22 June 1920, Chicago, Illinois, USA
28 January 1924, Detroit, Michigan, USA
18 September 1933, Nutley, New Jersey, USA
16 November 1944, Kansas City, Missouri, USA
7 September 1918, Kansas City, Kansas, USA
14 July 1932, Linden, New Jersey, USA
22 February 1911, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
23 December 1921, New York City, New York, USA
28 December 1944, Los Angeles, California, USA
15 December 1911, New York City, New York, USA
8 June 1924, Chicago, Illinois, USA
9 June 1955, Los Angeles County, California, USA
9 March 1902, Frankfort, Indiana, USA
24 January 1910, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
28 June 1917, Kansas City, Missouri, USA
24 January 1918, Alberta, Canada
July 01, 2016
Visually striking, with two astonishing lead performances, but it never quite plumbs the emotional depths of the Truman Capote source material.
February 09, 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.
May 20, 2003
Excellent quasidocumentary, which sends shivers down the spine while moving the viewer to ponder.
April 08, 2008
A probing, sensitive, tasteful, balanced and suspenseful documentary-drama.
June 18, 2002
Brooks' great achievement in the film is to portray Smith and Hickock as the unexceptional, dim-witted, morally adrift losers they were.
September 11, 2015
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.
September 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.
November 28, 2015
Writer-director Richard Brooks' detached style allows for a non-exploitative presentation, and the contributions by cinematographer Conrad Hall and composer Quincy Jones are first-rate.
December 03, 2015
Chief among the film's distinctions are the beautiful gloom of Conrad Hall's monochromatic cinematography... There are the fearless, wonderfully contrasting performances by Robert Blake and Scott Wilson as the sociopathic killers.
September 10, 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."
March 02, 2006
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.
January 01, 2000
An uneasy mixture of facile Freudianism and 40s expressionism.
