Stanley Kubrick's [The Killing] is an estimable entry into that small field of well-made crime films that expose the modus operandi of the colossal caper. Like Rififi and The Asphalt Jungle (after which it is principally patterned) its action is thickly and informatively plotted, possessed of that classic fatality that insures retribution, and dependent for its thrills upon a network of smooth calculation severed by fey circumstance and mislaid trusts….
His film lacks the pervasive knowledge and control of John Huston's masterwork, and although his material has absorbed him utterly, he has been wise to remain detached from it. His camera is relentlessly objective, cool, economically observant, and capable of an unusual rhetoric, as when, at the film's end, the hero's captors advance upon him and are framed to remind us of the menacing gunman targets that had filled the screen a few reels before…. [The] visual authority of The Killing consistently dominates a flawed script. In a film that is largely a crescendo of detail and preparation, Kubrick has found it necessary at the peak of tension, to resort to cutbacks in order to fill in information and set his sprawling scene. Thus the action at its climax knots and unravels, knots and unravels. This is done in the name of clarity, but a certain cumulative suspense is thereby sacrificed. Kubrick has also used an off-screen narrator where one would have preferred an absolutely cinematic exposition. The documented effect that is obtained invades the unique privacy of events and becomes negligible when we are told what we do not really need to know…. (p. 30)
