Khoi Vinh’s review published on Letterboxd:
A remarkable performance by Jess Bradford as a young boy left to fend for himself in a Missouri hotel in the Depression can’t quite save this well-intentioned early Steven Soderbergh drama. The director’s keen eye and resistance to sentimentality is in evidence, but he fights to maintain that integrity without veering further and further into clichéd territory. The narrative is Tom Sawyer-like—or maybe Henry Huggins-like?—in its episodic structure; in one scene we see Bradford’s character cleaning up at marbles; in another he’s reluctantly entertaining a sick girl down the hall; then another where he’s fibbing his way through a party at a rich friend’s house, etc. They’re all charming, but none of them truly break out into any kind of revelatory insight, nor do they all contribute to a cohesive whole. I can see why Soderbergh felt like he needed to reassess his approach to filmmaking; “King of the Hill” shows that he had the instincts to speak distinctively but not yet the tools to do so.