Capote
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment | Release Date: September 30, 2005 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
88
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 40 Critic Reviews
Positive:
38
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Hollywood ReporterKirk 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
100
VarietyDavid 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
100
Christian Science MonitorPeter 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
100
USA TodayClaudia Puig
In Capote, Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant transformation into the mannered writer takes your breath away. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe Morgenstern
What Mr. Hoffman has done here borders on the miraculous.
100
TV Guide MagazineKen 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
100
The New YorkerDavid 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
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalle
A triumph that goes well beyond Hoffman's tour de force performance. Read full review
100
Dallas ObserverRobert Wilonsky
How often does one see a masterpiece about a masterpiece? Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael 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
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRoger 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
100
Washington PostStephen 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
100
Portland OregonianShawn 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
100
Baltimore SunMichael 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
100
EmpireKim 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
100
Film ThreatEllen 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
91
Entertainment WeeklyOwen Gleiberman
Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts. Read full review
90
TimeRichard 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
90
The New York TimesDana 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
90
Los Angeles TimesCarina 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
90
SlateDavid Edelstein
Hoffman goes beyond the surface mannerisms and diction. He disappears into Capote. Read full review
90
L.A. WeeklyElla 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
88
Rolling StonePeter Travers
Capote is a movie that doesn't pull its punches. It's a knockout. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames 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
88
New York PostLou 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
88
PremiereGlenn 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
88
Boston GlobeTy 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
88
Miami HeraldRene 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
88
Philadelphia InquirerCarrie 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
88
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
83
Seattle Post-IntelligencerWilliam 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
80
The A.V. ClubNathan 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
78
Austin ChronicleKimberley 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
75
New York Daily NewsJack 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
75
Charlotte ObserverLawrence Toppman
Whatever you feel about Truman Capote, you won't be able to turn away from him here. Read full review
70
The New RepublicStanley 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
70
Chicago ReaderJonathan 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
70
Village VoiceJ. Hoberman
In the bell jar that is Capote, Hoffman bogarts the oxygen; everyone else asphyxiates. Read full review
60
SalonStephanie 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
60
New York Magazine (Vulture)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
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