In Cold Blood (1967)
Directed by Richard Brooks
After a botched robbery results in the brutal murder of a rural family, two drifters elude police, in the end coming to terms with their own mortality and the repercussions of their vile atrocity.
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What critics compared In Cold Blood to
With a local Deputy (JAMES RANSONE) doing some investigating work for him on those, Ellison attempts to piece everything together in hopes that his resultant work might rival the success of "In Cold Blood."
He tells his wife (Juliet Rylance) that he’s stumbled onto his In Cold Blood.
With Ellison's decision to keep the videos from the authorities, despite multiple bumps in the night as a consequence of his film-viewing, Derrickson attempts to capture a flimsy Capote -esque quandary of a writer putting himself and others in danger in order to claim fame (at one point, Ellison even exclaims that the story he's following could be his In Cold Blood).
“This could be my In Cold Blood,” he says.
After watching the first two (including the one depicting the hanging of the family he’s writing about), he starts to call the police, but then changes his mind, perhaps because he realizes that these films could mark his true breakthrough, providing the kind of sensational material that will assure his next project legendary status—his In Cold Blood, as he puts it.
Believing he's stumbled across his own In Cold Blood, he stays up nights scrutinizing the films and looking for connections between killings whose locations and victims are still unknown.
Blanc is a cross between James Bond (inevitably) and Truman Capote of “In Cold Blood” mode, and he speaks in a comically thick Southern drawl.
More recently, he made out with Truman Capote (Toby Jones) in Infamous, Douglas McGrath's retelling of the story of the writing of In Cold Blood.
If Richard Brooks' In Cold Blood (1967), based on Capote's nonfiction novel, is an unusually well-respected example of the genre, more often, true crime is trashed for being voyeuristic and sensationalistic, by definition.
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Instead, Bernie plays like In Cold Blood — if it had been directed by Christopher Guest.
It's like "In Cold Blood" written by Flannery O'Connor instead of Truman Capote.
Besides Mendes and Ball, cinematographer Conrad Hall (The Professionals & In Cold Blood) and composer Thomas Newman (The Shawshank Redemption) give us some of their best work.
It's a picture with a great cool shiny surface, and it boasts superb actors (Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening and a finely chosen ensemble), witty and iconoclastic writing (by Alan Ball of TV's "Cybill"), vigorous and imaginative direction (by British newcomer Sam Mendes) and brilliantly stylized cinematography (by the great Conrad Hall, of "Cool Hand Luke" and "In Cold Blood").
But in the tradition of films such as " In Cold Blood ," " Badlands " and " Natural Born Killers ," this is a story about murders committed not by monsters in masks or gun-wielding gangsters, but by damaged souls who were either born without a conscience or left it behind along the way.
There have been great movies about home invasion, like " In Cold Blood ," that made more of it than gruesome "events."
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The fact that the audience does not see very much violence perptrated increases the intensity enormously, The fact that the perpetrators motive is not revealed also increases the tension and terror - shades of "In Cold Blood"?
Shot with an excellent cast on the South Florida locations where the real Bobby Kent was killed, it comes across in its better moments like a 'slacker' version of In Cold Blood.