Metacritic reviews

This is an unrepentantly cynical take on the hope-and-change promised to the US in 2008; this year's election race makes it look even bleaker, an icily confident black comedy of continued disillusion.

The film is terribly smart in every respect, with ne'er-a-false note performances and superb craft work from top to bottom.

Uncompromising and uncommercial, divisive and brave, Killing Them Softly bitterly boils at the state of the nation.

A routine, even mundane crime story relayed in tones of world-weary fatigue, Killing Them Softly deglams the mob movie to coolly distinctive if rarely pulse-quickening effect.

Killing Them Softly tries hard - and succeeds - to be a film of the now with its political parallels right in front of us. Yet it's also an invisible companion to the dirty business at hand - and it is a business.

He's [Pitt] not particularly inventive - with his appraising eyes and a toothpick in his mouth, he's like Redford without the edge - but he uses his stardom cannily, to kill with softness.

Tough, stylish, violent and studded with stars – but like so many of its American gangsters, Killing Them Softly doesn't quite get the job done.

A good, efficient crime thriller, let down by clunky social commentary but lifted by excellent performances, including perhaps Brad Pitt's recent best.

Despite enough pummeling to flatten Rocky Balboa in all six movies, the only thing that truly rewards your attendance is Pitt in another effortless star performance.

The film's cynicism, like everything else, is nothing more than empty posturing, a fashionable pose adopted to ingratiate itself with a disenfranchised public.