Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
A high-priced call girl is forced to depend on a reluctant private eye when she is stalked by a psychopath.
Klute is anchored by Jane Fonda's Oscar-winning, deeply internalized performance as Bree Daniel, one of cinema's most psychologically complex portraits of a woman. Gordon Willis's shadowy, paranoid cinematography — all deep blacks and oppressive urban spaces — is genuinely exceptional, defining the neo-noir visual grammar of the era. The plot functions solidly as a thriller but the whodunit mechanics are fairly conventional and the mystery's resolution is somewhat anticlimactic. Novelty is moderate: the film's focus on the woman's interiority over the detective's procedural is distinctive for its time but not wholly singular. The ending, while thematically appropriate in its ambivalence, feels muted rather than fully satisfying.