Capote

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.

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.

USA Today Claudia Puig

In Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant transformation into the mannered writer takes your breath away.

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.

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.

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

A triumph that goes well beyond Hoffman's tour de force performance.

Dallas Observer Robert Wilonsky

How often does one see a masterpiece about a masterpiece?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts.

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.

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.

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.

Slate David Edelstein

Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Capote is a movie that doesn't pull its punches. It's a knockout.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Whatever you feel about Truman Capote, you won't be able to turn away from him here.

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.

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.

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.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

In the bell jar that is Capote, Hoffman bogarts the oxygen; everyone else asphyxiates.

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.

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.