Metacritic reviews

Capote represents something unique in cinema.…Most eye-catching for critics and audiences in the weeks to come will be Philip Seymour Hoffman's brilliant metamorphosis into the persona of the late author.

The mesmerizing performance of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the celebrated writer dominates every scene, while director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Dan Futterman's penetrating study enthralls in every aspect.

On the personal betrayals that accompany Capote's ache for literary transcendence. The betrayals were necessary to create "In Cold Blood." This is why Capote is such an unsettlingly ambiguous experience.

Capote honors its subject by doing just what Truman Capote did. It teases, fascinates, and haunts.

Hoffman and the film are terrific. Supported by the eminent Catherine Keener (as author Harper Lee) and Chris Cooper (as detective Alvin Dewey), Hoffman begins with a dead-on impersonation of Capote that soon becomes a kind of channeling as the audience comes to see this American tragedy through his eyes.

A fascinating and fine-grained reconstruction of that period in its subject's life, a time when he (Capote) pursued literary glory and flirted with moral ruin.

Miller and Futterman avoid the pitfalls of the genre by refusing to mythologize the artist, plunging instead into the soul of the man.

Capote is a movie that doesn't pull its punches. It's a knockout.

The brilliance of Bennett's movie is that it concentrates on the characters and their interaction and never becomes a mouthpiece for one side or the other with respect to the death penalty.

Capote begins as a sprawling, vivacious comedy-drama in which Hoffman's Capote is only one of a number of fascinating characters, including Chris Cooper's upstanding, ramrod-straight lawman and Keener's tough, blunt assistant/sidekick/foil/author.