81
Metascore
15 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100Klute still perhaps stands as Pakula's finest moment. Informed in part by the conventions of film noir - duplicitous female, ambitious private investigator, and murky goings on of the sexual variety - Klute manages to distill them all into something highly original and distinctly unsettling.
- 90Chicago ReaderDave KehrChicago ReaderDave KehrDonald Sutherland works small and subtly, balancing Jane Fonda's flashy virtuoso technique.
- 89Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenAustin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenFonda (who received an Oscar) and Sutherland are at the top of their game in this mystery/thriller that also provides a fascinating look into the mind and soul of a top NYC call girl.
- 88Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertIn Klute you don't have two attractive acting vacuums reciting speeches at each other. With Fonda and Sutherland, you have actors who understand and sympathize with their characters, and you have a vehicle worthy of that sort of intelligence. So the fact that the thriller stuff doesn't always work isn't so important.
- 88Slant MagazineChuck BowenSlant MagazineChuck BowenPakula’s seminal detective thriller, which is truly a piercing examination of loneliness.
- 80Time OutTime OutFor once, a genuinely psychological thriller.
- 80Village VoiceMelissa AndersonVillage VoiceMelissa AndersonThe dread and unease that suffuse the film — never has the peal of a rotary phone sounded more terrifying — seem rooted partly in anxiety over second-wave feminism, the cresting of which nearly coincided with the release of this movie, one that centers on its heroine’s profound ambivalence about growing emotionally attached to a man.
- Pakula, when he is not in dulging in subjective camera, strives to give his film the look of structural geometry, but despite the sharp edges and dramatic spaces and cinema presence out of Citizen Kane, it all suggests a tepid, rather tasteless mush.