Sure, The Killing is a notable and influential blueprint for many future heist movies, but so many of those heist movies to come would be far more entertaining and better written than it. The running time is just too limited to give us reason to care about any of the characters—although it tries—and the heist itself and parts of its aftermath are the only sections of The Killing that demand attention. The first mature work from Stanley Kubrick, but not his first great work.