Metacritic reviews

Kiss of Death was directed by Barbet Schroeder ("Single White Female") in the fashion of a creepily smirking cat toying with a particularly appealing mouse.

With keen-edged direction by Barbet Schroeder and a Richard Price screenplay loaded with venomous savvy, Kiss of Death is the most high-powered and brutal New York gangster movie since "GoodFellas." [21 Apr 1995, p.41]

The movie’s streetwise screenwriter, Richard Price, knows characters like this do exist — but only an actor like Cage can bring them off.

Price's script is saturated in grungy, darkly comic detail, full of left turns and double-double-crosses, and Schroeder's carefully crafted, patient pacing is refreshing—he gradually builds tension and dread, making the confrontations truly suspenseful and the outlandish action scenes more jarring and memorable.

You feel yourself sinking deeper and deeper into a whole universe that's been put together with almost anthropological intricacy and feels convincing to its tiniest detail. [20 Apr 1995]

Schroeder's film is fun to watch, even when it's being predictable or brutal, but its memory is nearly gone the next day.

Well made, but not entirely successful ensemble thriller.

There is plot and more plot in Kiss of Death. By the time it's over you may wish you had taken notes, to keep track of who is doing what, and with which, and to whom.

All Jimmy wants is for his life to return to normal. But Price and director Barbet Schroeder haven't done a very good job of letting us know who this guy is—or even what normal is to him. Schroeder also shifts back and forth between a tone of earnest homage to the mood and feel of the classic thriller to one that sends up the genre, laughing slyly behind its back.

Although director Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female, Reversal of Fortune, Barfly) does a workmanlike job of stirring in the grimy New York atmosphere, the picture only surges to life when Cage strides on camera. [21 Apr 1995]