Killing Them Softly won’t please everyone. The trailer hints at the punctuations of intense violence that are peppered throughout – one particular scene involving a slow motion drive-by shooting takes what could have been just a passing moment and makes it breathtakingly beautiful/borderline poetic – but what many won’t expect are the underlying messages that lurk beneath the surface of the picture and eventually rise up to beat the viewer repeatedly over the head. (Cinema, Killing Them Softly) 8/10