What It's About:

Bennet Miller's penetrating feature about the celebrity writer (played superbly by an Oscar-winning Philip Seymour Hoffman) covers perhaps the most pivotal and interesting part of Capote's life: his 1959 decision to get away from fluffy fiction and write a hard, tell-all piece about a then-recent crime: the grisly, senseless butchering of a Kansas farming family by two loners, Perry Smith (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and Richard Hickock (Mark Pellegrino). The resulting book - "In Cold Blood" - would break new ground, inaugurating the non-fiction novel, but the experience would also exact a heavy toll on its author due to encroaching inner demons, and Capote's unusually charged relationship with Smith.

Why I Love It:

Hoffman's uncanny portrayal of brilliant misfit Truman Capote is reason enough to see this vivid, unnerving film, but the focus on his writing of "Blood" lets us peer into the tortured psyche of a man who always felt alone and set apart, with only his words to win him acknowledgment. Though Truman bonds with Smith as a fellow outcast (with homo-erotic undertones also evident), he also misleads and manipulates the convict to achieve his own literary ends. Collins scores as a downright spooky Smith, and Oscar-nominated Catherine Keener does a nicely measured turn as Capote's childhood friend, novice author Harper Lee. A layered, complex piece about a tragic event, and one profoundly disillusioned man who used it to create his last, most enduring work.