Critics reviews

[Kimi] is an ordinary genre piece — so ordinary that not even its insistent topicality can make it seem more compelling.

With Kimi, director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have dazzlingly updated Rear Window for the work-from-home age: their film puts a thrillingly contemporary spin on a vintage paranoia-drenched premise.

Soderbergh may not have intended Kimi to be a film primarily about the pandemic, but it understands intimately what it’s felt like to live through it.

Kimi occasionally falters in terms of character and dramaturgy, but Soderbergh’s latest is still a slick, undeniably cool Hitchcockian riff on smart technology’s dual nature.

A tidy 89-minute suspense yarn that doesn’t exactly produce thrills and chills, but efficiently guides you through a labyrinth of technological caves and passageways to a satisfying end.

Kimi is in some ways a minor Soderbergh entry, an exercise in style rather than something of great substance, but it’s a thrill to watch him at play, even when he’s taking it easy, he’s still working harder than most of his peers.

"KIMI" is a brilliantly paced, no-nonsense gem from one of the best American filmmakers.

[Kimi explores] thoughtful, pertinent issues in an immensely entertaining, compact package... Once again Soderbergh has delivered a film that comes across as effortlessly constructed, which could only be achieved through immense consideration of every detail.

Effective as a nail-biting thriller, [Kimi] ultimately lands with a jolt because it takes place in a world that we recognize at once as an unbearable cyberpunk dystopia and as, undeniably, the one we already live in.

There’s a lot to enjoy about “KIMI..." But I especially love how it turns another staple from classic noir and the paranoid thriller, the (usually) male protagonist who nobody believes, into a woman whose paranoia is as righteous as it is right.

[Kimi] is a welcome reminder that less, in the movies, can sometimes be more. It’s also an art-suspense pastiche that’s clever enough to hook you.

Soderbergh drops us into that world with a casualness that’s unnerving precisely because of how unnerving it isn’t; this is how we live now, he and screenwriter David Koepp suggest... Much of the pleasure of “Kimi...” comes from the way it repurposes an old-school genre template with up-to-the-minute materials.