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Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: Despite enough pummeling to flatten Rocky Balboa in all six movies, the only thing that truly rewards your attendance is Pitt in another effortless star performance. Read more
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: In Killing Them Softly, Dominik's first feature since The Assassination of Jesse James, Pitt once again plays a quietly powerful sociopath, and once again the screen vibrates. Read more
Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies: And at the end, when that character collides head on with the election theme Dominik tends to overstate throughout, it all leads up to a punch line so thoroughly anti-inspirational and mordantly funny and just about perfect ... Read more
A.O. Scott, New York Times: The movie is more concerned with conjuring an aura of meaningfulness than with actually meaning anything. Read more
David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: Grimly amusing then shockingly brutal. Read more
Rex Reed, New York Observer: The point of this vile, cynical and ultimately preposterous film is that America is reeling from spiritual numbness and ethical paralysis, and optimism is a game for fools. Read more
Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal: The film, for all its visual felicities, comes to life only sporadically. Read more
Claudia Puig, USA Today: Languorous to the point of rambling, the story of double-crossing and vengeance is darkly funny, graphically violent and gorgeously shot. Read more
Soren Anderson, Seattle Times: Dominik ... expertly captures the flavor of his Higgins source material. Read more
Scott Tobias, AV Club: While it isn't unusual for nasty little genre movies like Dominik's stylish heist thriller to smuggle such themes under the surface, Killing Them Softly makes them startlingly explicit. Read more
Ty Burr, Boston Globe: A bleakly comic, brutally Darwinian gangland saga that at times comes close to being this year's "Drive." Read more
J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: The Louisiana locations are appropriately cruddy, and the occasional scenes of violence are frightening, visceral, and beautifully photographed. Read more
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: This is a talkative picture, allowing time and space for comically preoccupied and quirkily pathetic exchanges between all sorts of strays and losers. Read more
Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: The dialogue is sharp and so are the performances. Andrew Dominik directed this neo-noir in a low-key comic style that's alternately gritty and fancy. The gritty stuff is best. Read more
Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post: Ultimately, as crafted as Killing Them Softly is, it's less satisfying than either The Sopranos or Goodfellas. Still, Dominik and his cast cruise some very mean streets indeed. Read more
Tom Long, Detroit News: Let's just call it DOA. Read more
Cary Darling, Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com: The anvils of obviousness rain down so hard and fast in New Zealand-born/Australian-based director Andrew Dominik's meditation on low-rent crime and American decline, that it might as well be a Coyote-Road Runner cartoon Read more
Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: A juicy, bloody, grimy and profane crime drama that amply satisfies as a deep-dish genre piece, Killing Them Softly rather insistently also wants to be something more. Read more
Betsy Sharkey, Los Angeles Times: The writer-director becomes so intent on hammering home the parallels between economic decay, political disappointments and petty criminals, there is nothing soft, or subtle, about it. He should trust his audience more. Read more
Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News: The scenes between Pitt and Gandolfini are the highlights of "Killing," with the two actors pivoting off each other with the ease and precision of gymnasts. Read more
Rafer Guzman, Newsday: Dominik turns this potentially gritty crime flick into a soggy political metaphor for the 2008 financial crisis. Read more
Anthony Lane, New Yorker: One of the best things in the movie is a conversation between Pitt and Jenkins, on a torrential day, seated in a nondescript car beneath a bridge. Read more
Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: If those cynical politics don't fit yours, you can also enjoy the film as simply a bit of stylishly shot, nicely acted, hardboiled noir. Read more
Stephanie Zacharek, NPR: It's the characters, and their words, that drive the story here, and Dominik preserves all their scruffy colors ... Read more
Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: Pitt, entering his third decade of fame, continues to show how there was always a deadly serious actor in him all along. Read more
Kyle Smith, New York Post: It isn't much of a movie. I might forgive the slow start if it weren't for the slow middle and slow end. Read more
Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Jolting, suspenseful, full of twisted sympathy for its goons' row of characters, and wickedly amusing to boot, Killing Them Softly summons up the ghosts of Goodfellas and a whole nasty tradition of crime pics. Read more
Richard Roeper, Richard Roeper.com: 'Killing Them Softly' collapses under the crushing weight of the director's narcissism. Read more
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: It seems as if I've been seeing versions of this story since forever. Read more
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: The acting is aces, especially Pitt mixing it up with the superb James Gandolfini, as an assassin losing his game to hooch and hookers. They make this movie a potently nasty provocation. Read more
Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: It has a weird, buzzing, intense quality that has burrowed its way deep into my brain like some invasive sci-fi organism. Read more
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: There is not one moment in the film that doesn't represent the director's carefully considered thought, whether we're talking about acting values, camera placement, sound or style of presentation. Read more
Dana Stevens, Slate: It's hard to deglamorize the criminal life when you can't resist showing a bullet leaving a gun barrel in stylized super-slow motion or scoring the anti-hero's first entrance to a Johnny Cash song. Read more
Christy Lemire, Associated Press: An incredibly stylish genre exercise set in the world of mobsters, junkies and lowlifes, but it's also trying incredibly hard to be About Something. Read more
Kristin Tillotson, Minneapolis Star Tribune: Clever dialogue can make up for one-dimensional characters, and amped-up action can disguise a thin plot. Here, we get too little of either. Read more
Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Like the politicians it tries to pull into the big picture, "Killing Them Softly" promises more than it delivers. Read more
Jon Frosch, The Atlantic: Dominik's frontal critique of US-style capitalism may be facile, but it gives the movie a bristling anger and a more lasting burn than other recent offerings in the same genre. Read more
Christopher Orr, The Atlantic: Like its source material, the movie is stylish, profane, intelligent, and eminently diverting. But as much as it is a delight that Dominik has disinterred Higgins's work, it is a mild disappointment that the result is not more substantial. Read more
Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: A stylish, brutal affair that delivers grim atmosphere and punishing violence but loses impact in telegraphing its political punches. Read more
Peter Howell, Toronto Star: This is a deeply cynical movie, with not much to say but a lot to feel. Read more
Alonso Duralde, TheWrap: While the cast is consistently watchable and on-point, Dominik disappoints as both scenarist and filmmaker. Read more
Dave Calhoun, Time Out: It pulls off the clever trick of operating as a gangster movie - featuring characters with missions to complete and people to kill - while at the same time sarkily undermining these same folk, attributing them with a heavy dose of incompetence. Read more
Justin Chang, Variety: Trading in pleasures of a deliberately rarefied sort, writer-director Andrew Dominik's talky, character-rich genre piece largely short-circuits thrills to sketch a grimly funny portrait of thugs taking care of business, in every rotten sense of the word. Read more
Karina Longworth, Village Voice: It's a movie that shows, and then tells, tells, and tells again, its vibrant conjuring of contemporary cynicism felled by Dominik's lack of faith in his audience's ability to connect thematic dots. Read more
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: Possesses a modicum of swagger and style, even as it perpetuates some of the crime genre's more tedious cliches, from slow-motion savagery to facile cynicism. Read more