Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Mehdi Hoffman There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

dromasca Revisiting the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski is a very special experience, both from a cinematographic and a historical point of view. I have seen the 'Decalogue' series almost 30 years ago, and A Short Film About Killing was part of it, in its shorter version. The time that passed since its release and the abrupt ending of the career and then of the life of Kieslowski provide a very different perspective. His films may be the same, and he certainly was one of the greatest film directors of his time and of all times. I had the chance to grow older, see more cinema and accumulate more life experience. The perspective is different, the way we read and understand his movies changed.By 1988 making such a film in Poland meant taking sides from a political, from a moral, and from an artistic point of view. The 80s had begun with the Solidarity movement in Poland which gave the sign of the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe at the end of the decade, but in the meantime military rule was imposed and freedom of art expression was limited. Film directors like Wajda took the more political path in their films, while Kieslowski chose the more subtle way of making the ten films that illustrate the Commandments placed in the realities of his country and of his time. 'A Short Film About Killing' deals with the 5th commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' in a superbly constructed plead against the death penalty. The first part of the film builds in a Hitchcock style the story of a murder with no apparent reasons (Truman Capote's 'In Cold Blood' comes to mind) . Three characters belonging with three parallel threads will eventually meet in a violent and absurd event. But is not any murder an absurd and repelling event? The second part deals with the punishment of the crime. The young man who committed the murder is tried and condemned to death. We follow his last hours, we start understanding his background, and then, he dies. Absurd as well. An eloquent but one sided demonstration, as his victim has never any chance of pleading for his right to live. This is - maybe - the only flaw of the moral judgment in this story.The construction of the story is perfect. Some of the images remind the French New Wave gangster films, but the background is the tern and grey landscape of Poland with the impersonal architecture that spread over all Eastern Europe. Kieslowski does here one more trick - he used different color filters for each frame that sometime impose yellow or green nuances to the image, some other time darken part of the screen. It's just one more visual comment to emphasize the atmosphere of decay - moral, social, human decay. So far we are from the rosy nuances of the fake 'socialist realism' style. Acting is superb, as in many Polish films of that period, with Miroslaw Baka, shining in the lead role and Krzysztof Globisz supporting him as the lawyer who may be the only positive character in the story. Overall, this film keeps all its dramatic and moral value in time, but also is enriched by the political dimension it receives in the perspective of the time. One of Kieslowski's best movies - highly recommended.

bjhendo An awful lot goes through your mind whie watching this. It's certainly not a cheery film and most Kieslowski films are very dreary, Perhaps the most realistic crime film ever made . Not much is said verbally with the main Character it's all told through his actions and body language. We have all walked the streets alone , felt isolated and alone. Much of this story is about loneliness. Even the victim is a loner finding comfort in his small confined taxi. I won't give too much away about the story. a must see and if your not a fan of foreign cinema this is one of the easier to follow, told simplistic. It's a difficult and challenging film and apparently changed Polands judicial system it had so much power. A masterpiece but a little bleak to be perfect .

niceguy_2106 Kieslowski chose to adapt both this and "A short Film About Love" into feature-length pieces after originally conceiving the idea as a ten-part series known as "Dekalog" for Polish Television. The series was to be loosely based on Kieslowski's, and his co-writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz's, interpretations of the ten commandments as set in modern-day Warsaw."A Short Film About Killing", their representation of the commandment, "Thou shall not kill", is considered the only one of the ten films to have an explicit political stance, reflecting Kieslowski's own opposition to capital punishment.It is certainly one of the strongest, most emotionally jarring of the series, as the slow, melancholic build-up of the first act finally culminates in a harrowingly explicit fifteen minute scene of the protagonist Jacek's unmotivated killing of a local taxi driver.The second act juxtaposes this ruthless murder by portraying Jacek's own subsequent (and surprisingly similar in its cold-blooded and calculated method) killing at the hands of the Polish legal system.There is a claustrophobic compositioning of shots throughout the film, and it comes as no surprise that Kieslowski himself, when interviewed, put particularly stress on wanting to encapsulate the audience in the world of his characters. This technique emphasises the alienation, the physical detachment, Jacek feels with the world around him, allowing an audience to, if not sympathise directly with him, at least empathise with his internal psychology somewhat.Given this creation of a character who does not directly relate to an audience (they are not "rooting" for him in any real sense), Kieslowski brings a realism and a certain courage in his argument against capital judgement by neither condemning or condoning his character's actions, and therefore not choosing to go the easy route of say, supplying all the answers and manipulating an audience into exactly how they should feel.

Dr_Kruger A very simple film that should make even the extreme right wing supporters of the death penalty at least question their beliefs.Personally, I am a supporter of capital punishment, and until the final 15 minutes I was still unfazed by the film and clear in my mind that if used correctly it should be implemented. I know all the arguments about capital punishment not affecting crime rates but to be honest I don't really care about that. It's all about an eye for an eye and allowing relatives a degree of closure knowing that the perpetrator who killed their love one had suffered a similar fate.However, and this is where this film is clever, the film doesn't allow you to see any real background to the character before committing his crime. It allows you to see only the act and judge the character on the act alone. If the film ended at the murder you would also believe capital punishment is not such a bad idea after all. Once we go past the very short trial (A long drawn out trial was rightly skipped as we already know the fate of our young man), and we get the one on one interview with the aspiring anti death penalty barrister we start to see just how screwed up this kid is, and how the rage in him is not entirely of his own making. Just as you start to question if you knew your mind doubts start to creep in and, just as quickly, before you can really gather any coherent thoughts he is whisked away to his death, and the act is entirely as abhorrent as you imagine it would be.The nasty high risers and grainy colourless backgrounds set the scene well, and the shaded lenses, focusing on the main character highlighting his loneliness and possibly his narrow mindedness made it a rather sad film to watch, but it certainly is worth sticking with.An 9/10 is definitely warranted