Killing Zoe

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