Killing Zoe

The truly chilling aspect of Killing Zoe is the correlation Avary makes between the gang’s nihilistic attitude and its penchant for violence. He pinpoints the schism in a precise and unnerving manner. Read full review

It's riveting stuff, but unlike Tarantino's work - layered with casual irony, deadpan dialogue and encyclopedic pop-cult references - Killing Zoe is what it is and nothing more: a nihilistic crime film, steeped in carnage and chaos. [14 Sep 1994, p.E02]

It must have been even more exhausting to make this film than it is to watch it. But it's made with a kind of manic joy that makes me suspect its writer-director, Roger Roberts Avary, might develop into a considerable filmmaker, once he thinks of something to say. Read full review

Ultimately, the greatest fault with Killing Zoe may lie in Avary's ambition. In trying to do too much (crime film, love story, psychological thriller, and dissection of an alienated generation) with a ninety-minute motion picture, his focus becomes blurred. Regardless, with a style that alternately recalls John Woo and Sam Peckinpah, and a tone that is nihilistic in the extreme, he has created a movie that, while obviously flawed, isn't easily forgotten. Read full review

Avary suggests much more than he shows, but his style carries such urgency, you walk away convinced you saw every bullet hit its mark. On that level, Killing Zoe should get Avary noticed -- the long, disastrous and occasionally suspenseful heist is the best part of the movie -- but it's the stuff at the edges that shows this guy has genuine talent. [28 Oct 1994, p.G4]

Killing Zoe is a raucous, arty little neo-film-noir that comes equipped with a bucket of blood to splatter the halls of convention. It’s not terribly good but you keep expecting it to take off in unexpected directions. Read full review

Quentin Tarantino sans the witty dialogue. Read full review

Killing Zoe is another jolly bloodbath about disaffected young people having trouble getting in touch with their feelings, so they go on a spree, killing people, killing everything, tra-la- la-la-la. Read full review

For all its tough-guy posturing, Killing Zoe seems like a boy's plaything, the cinematic equivalent of pulling the wings off flies. Read full review

There have to be better ways of wasting money and killing time than the fashionable nihilism of Killing Zoe. Read full review

Mr. Avary's debut feature, fiercely ambitious but way out of control, is an orgiastically violent exercise in hand-me-down nihilism, much more firmly rooted in cinematic posturing than in real pain. Read full review

Violent, kinetic, and occasionally clever, KILLING ZOE is no match for either RESERVOIR DOGS or PULP FICTION, but it's a zoned-out rollercoaster ride of the first order. Read full review

The movie is slick, good-looking, nicely edited and empty. [09 Sep 1994, p.F]

Arty slow motion, deliberately distorted photography and even bits of animation are tossed into the stew with the same abandon that Oliver Stone brought to the story Tarantino wrote for Natural Born Killers. But Avary's movie lacks the strong performances and quirky humor that made Reservoir Dogs more than just another low-budget exercise in excess. [09 Sep 1994, p.H29]

Clearly, Avary wrote himself into a tight corner and, unlike his mentor, lacks the narrative imagination - the clever shifting of time planes, the neat overlapping of incident - to extricate himself. Instead, quite literally, he blasts his way out and, in the process, shoots his picture in the foot. Killing Zoe starts life as a vigorous wannabe, but pulls up dead lame. [04 Nov 1994]

Killing Zoe lacks the incisiveness, the tightly controlled irony, and the blank verse power in the profane dialogue that enabled "Reservoir Dogs" to transcend its admittedly horrific violence. [25 Nov 1994]

Eric Stoltz and Julie Delpy have some effective moments, but energetic acting isn't enough to redeem the movie from its pointless excesses. [02 Sep 1994, p.11]

A competent but hardly exhilarating crime flick that is definitely not for the squeamish. [07 Oct 1994, p.3G]

The idiocy of the plot is the tip-off that writer-director Roger Avary is really just interested in random displays of nihilistic decadence (e.g., heroin-shooting, prostitute-bashing, lotsa blood). Read full review

Killing Zoe has little of the style, pacing, characterization, or wit of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction (though Avary worked on the scripts of both). Read full review

How can a critic feel good about a movie that sets out to numb us with sheer gruesomeness; that embraces nihilism and sadism so enthusiastically; that offers no moral point of view or redemption in its characters, all while feebly aspiring to be a portrait of its generation? [09 Sep 1994]

Killing Zoe is the worst kind of bad movie, a violent comedy that's not funny. [14 Sep 1994, p.35]