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Capote
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics

Universal acclaim
Based on 40 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 126 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
Dan Futterman
Gerald Clarke (book)
Directed by: Bennett Miller
Release Date:
Theatrical: September 30, 2005
DVD: March 21, 2006
Running Time: 98 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for some violent images and brief strong language
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Clifton Collins Jr., Chris Cooper, Bruce Greenwood, Bob Balaban, Amy Ryan, and Mark Pellegrino
A profile of Truman Capote during the years he researched the story that was to become the basis for the book "In Cold Blood."
Also On Metacritic
FILM: In Cold Blood (1967)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Capote represents something unique in cinema.…Most eye-catching for critics and audiences in the weeks to come will be Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant metamorphosis into the persona of the late author.
Read Full Review >Variety David Rooney
The mesmerizing performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the celebrated writer dominates every scene, while director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman's penetrating study enthralls in every aspect.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
In Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant transformation into the mannered writer takes your breath away.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
What Mr. Hoffman has done here borders on the miraculous.
Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
On the personal betrayals that accompany Capote's ache for literary transcendence. The betrayals were necessary to create "In Cold Blood." This is why Capote is such an unsettlingly ambiguous experience.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Actor-turned-writer Dan Futterman's smart, subtle screenplay, which explores both Capote's determination to turn murder into literature and the deeply troubling questions he raised in the process.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Small-scaled and limited, Capote is nevertheless the most intelligent, detailed, and absorbing film ever made about a writer's working method and character--in this case, a mixed quiver of strength, guile, malice, and mendacity.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
A triumph that goes well beyond Hoffman's tour de force performance.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky
How often does one see a masterpiece about a masterpiece?
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
The movie's excellence, a stylistic world apart from the strikingly photographed but rather hysterical 1967 film version of Capote's masterwork, is in capturing its subject without pinning him down.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Philip Seymour Hoffman's precise, uncanny performance as Capote doesn't imitate the author so much as channel him, as a man whose peculiarities mask great intelligence and deep wounds.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
The genius of the film, besides Hoffman's stunning performance, is that it knows exactly how much is enough. It never overplays, lingers or punches up.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
This is an awesome performance in an outstanding film, a film worthy, if you can imagine, of the book at its heart.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Just when you might give up on young American film directors making art the way Bergman and Kurosawa did, along comes Bennett Miller's quiet, tumultuous Capote.
Read Full Review >Empire Kim Newman
An outstanding film, showcasing a great performance, at once celebrating, analysing and criticising an important writer and his major book. You'll appreciate it more if you've read "In Cold Blood" recently and have seen enough footage of the real Truman Capote to know Hoffman is underplaying.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Ellen Marshall
One of the most beautifully stark, yet provocative and powerful films of 2005 has to be Capote. Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who gives his finest screen performance to date, literally becomes Truman Capote through effete mannerism, nasaly voice & self-absorbed tone.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Dana Stevens
A fascinating and fine-grained reconstruction of that period in its subject's life, a time when he (Capote) pursued literary glory and flirted with moral ruin.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
Hoffman and the film are terrific. Supported by the eminent Catherine Keener (as author Harper Lee) and Chris Cooper (as detective Alvin Dewey), Hoffman begins with a dead-on impersonation of Capote that soon becomes a kind of channeling as the audience comes to see this American tragedy through his eyes.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
Miller and Futterman avoid the pitfalls of the genre by refusing to mythologize the artist, plunging instead into the soul of the man.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
The triumph of Capote is that it both grants and shares with him that twisted brew of obsessive identification and monstrous detachment that is the fertile burden of the artist.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Beyond the eerily evocative impersonation, Hoffman's brilliance lies in not only playing the shrewd puppet master but also revealing that he too comes with strings attached, the most dominant being his consuming need for acclaim.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
A remarkably assured feature debut by Bennett Miller, a longtime director of commercials (and the documentary "The Cruise") whose no-frills style trusts that the powerful material and the uniformly excellent performances need little embellishment.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The brilliance of Bennett's movie is that it concentrates on the characters and their interaction and never becomes a mouthpiece for one side or the other with respect to the death penalty.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Capote is a movie that doesn't pull its punches. It's a knockout.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The movie implies that despite its thunderous success, the book also destroyed Capote, who crossed a line in his quest for personal glory for which he could never forgive himself -- no matter how many accolades it brought him.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey
Miller and Futterman tell their story with plain, uninflected film language, permitting the ambiguities to surface. Theirs is not the anti-capital-punishment tract of Richard Brooks' excellent 1967 film "In Cold Blood." It is a story about an accomplice to crime who lived to tell the story.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
Catherine Keener is remarkably subtle and soulful as Capote's friend and helpmeet Harper Lee, who delivers a shocking verdict against him at the end, but the movie, as you probably will not be surprised to learn, is owned by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Richly provocative entertainment, as heady as a cocktail party with the Manhattan literati and as vaguely troubling as the morning after.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
Indeed, it has to be one of the most eerie, morbidly absorbing and psychologically compelling movies ever made about a writer in the agonizing process of creating an important piece of literature.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
Capote begins as a sprawling, vivacious comedy-drama in which Hoffman's Capote is only one of a number of fascinating characters, including Chris Cooper's upstanding, ramrod-straight lawman and Keener's tough, blunt assistant/sidekick/foil/author.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
The fault does not lie with Hoffman (who doesn't so much act out Capote's distinctive mannerisms and high-pitched lisp as channel them); his performance is undeniably great. Everything else – solid, satisfying though it may be – falls short of that greatness.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Whatever you feel about Truman Capote, you won't be able to turn away from him here.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
What "Capote" fails to reveal to the audience is the sense of a homoerotic attraction between the author and Perry Smith (Clifton Collins Jr.). It is more than implied that one exists, but there isn't a scene between them that supports it or even makes it believable.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
The depictions of novelist Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) and editor William Shawn (Bob Balaban) aren't convincing, but Miller is mainly interested in Capote's identification and duplicitous relationship with Perry Smith, one of the murderers he was writing about, and that story rings true.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
A slight conceptual nudge and Capote would have focused on (as the closing line tells us) its true subject: an American author's success story. That theme is there, all right, but because it is not centered it is repellent, as the film pretends to be an account of the author's descent into collateral agony...With the true theme of fame-hunger fully fashioned, the film would have been a more authentic American epic.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
In the bell jar that is Capote, Hoffman bogarts the oxygen; everyone else asphyxiates.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Ken Tucker
Aside from yet another solid performance from Catherine Keener-playing a Harper Lee just preparing to publish "To Kill a Mockingbird," and here to act as Capote's unheeded moral conscience-that's the ONLY reason to see Capote.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
While the filmmaking overall suffers from a kind of tasteful, low-key blandness, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote keeps the blood coursing through it. He's the bright, chilling spot of color at the center of an otherwise beige movie.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.9 (out of 10) based on 126 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Sierra C. gave it a3:
A rather pedantic piece of story-telling. Hoffman is a good actor but his portrayal in this one certainly does him no justice. It's so put-on and did nothing to bring credence to the character. I am indeed baffled by the ravings he's got in the media. The saving grace of the movie is the strong performance by Clifton Collins Jr who succeeded in providing a glimpse into the dark soul of a killer.
Preston B. gave it a1:
This is possibly one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Hoffman's performance is spot-on as Capote but the story is so boring. The remaining characters are one dimensional. Tediously slow at times, I struggled to watch it till the end. Definitely overrated.
N K gave it a5:
Hoffman's performance is clearly phenomenal and I can appreciate that this is a very well made film, but I just don't like it. Capote is despicable and the murderers are scum - why do I give a damn about any of this?
Oleksa B gave it a4:
I couldn't help feeling a heavy bubble of disgust in my throat, hearing the main character speak like an imbecile clown. I know Mr.Hoffman as a real good actor, but this... 'performance' just gave me the willies. Whatever the real Truman Capote was like (well, who knows, maybe he indeed was an infantile pompous moron), the person which Mr.Hoffman is portraying is NOT a writer. And that woman character is not a writer either. The prisoner guy is credible, yes: lost and bitter, after letting the most primitive side of him once take the wrong control of his actions. But the writers... I don't believe them. And as one of the critics here said, the search portrayed in the film is not a search of existential drive that when perversed, makes people do horrid things: it is indeed a search for fame and celebrity status. What I understood after watching this movie is that I'll probably never read anything by Capote. Salinger, too, never finished a book since the 50's, but I don't suppose he died of alcoholism. He was simply looking for something esle in his books.
Doug G. gave it a5:
Excessively slow, unconvincing performance by Hoffmann, I did not feel much sympathy for the main character, who seemed to be mainly self-centered, lying and manipulative.
Isabel I. gave it a6:
It was just ok. The first part was better than the second half. I thought the last 20 mins really dragged. It could have been a made-for-TV movie. Don't understand what all the fuss is about.
Robert B. gave it a10:
This was simply the best picture of 2005. Seymout-Hoffman's channeling of Capote and a strong cast along with an intelligent screenplay and fine direction make it well worth savoring.
