Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Senteur As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

dr_alexander_reynolds As I scan the many laudatory reviews of this movie posted above, I find myself asking myself just what kind of movies from the past 30 or 40 years these reviewers have been watching, or indeed if they've watched any. No genre ages more quickly and more badly than the "big con" movie, since the whole satisfaction of the viewer hinges on the big final scene - which we know from every "con artist" movie from "The Sting" to Mamet's "House of Games" and which, inevitably, recurs in every familiar detail as the big closing scene of "Criminal" - in which all the characters who have been presented to us throughout the film as having no connection with one another - street-robbers, cops, "mark"s etc. - are revealed - gasp!! - to have secretly been part of some big coordinated scam after all. In a sense, that scene has been "used up" and dramaturgically useless since "The Sting", and all the subsequent "big con" movies of the 80's and 90's, have had to add some very special extra ingredient - such as Mamet's plumbing of the sexual and psychological abysses beneath the "con/mark" relation - in order to be movies of any even limited note. "Criminal" offers no such special angle or special depth and tries to trade on nothing but the - by now hopelessly threadbare - fascination of lives led according to the principle of the double-double-cross and the "nothing is what it seems". Precisely that, however, is the film's psychological downfall in the face of an audience which is - or which one would have assumed ought to be - as familiar by now with the conventions of this genre as it is with those of the mafia movie. The cinema MUST surely have taught us all enough about the lives and work of conmen by now for us to find it ludicrously improbable that either of the two main characters would be willing to expose thousands of dollars of money already "in hand" in order to secure the alleged "sure thing" of a deal that is to net them many thousands more (after all, it is the endemic idiocy of such greed and of the general greed-driven tendency to forget the "bird in the bush" principle that is the very basis of a conman's livelihood). Around this central crying improbability there cluster a dozen others, hardly less egregious: The John C. Reilly character would really have agreed in twenty seconds to the offer of the currency expert not to reveal that the note was a fake in return for a share of the money? Hardly, since it is hard to imagine a simpler way for the mark to find out that the note he was buying WAS indeed a fake than to send the currency expert along with just such an offer? Would he really have permitted any arrangement which might even possibly result in his parting with the note and having in hand, in return, only a CHECK which needed to be taken to a bank and cashed? The idea is ridiculous, since it would clearly involve running the risk of there happening what actually does happen at the bank in the penultimate scene. It seems that filmgoers and DVD-viewers are so desperate for that ever-more-elusive "wow-I-didn't-see-THAT-coming!" kick that large numbers of them are willing, these days, to bring their own willing paralysis of basic cogitative capacities to that "walking dead" genre, the "grifter movie". Well, at least I'll be spared hours of head-shaking incomprehension when I read on here in a couple of months rave review after rave review of a new mafia movie which features a scene in which the rat receives with relief and unconditional enthusiasm the message from the boss: "Sure, I know you helped set up the hit on my kid brother, and I'm not too happy about it. But I really need someone to help me watch out for the arrival of a drugs shipment down at the docks at 3 am tonight, so I'm willing to say: 'let bygones be bygones'. But remember to bring a couple of bags of cement so we both have something to sit on."

jsrinc Someone needs to tell Reilly to hire a new agent. I thought he was above this kind of crap. I begrudgingly sit through 1.5 hours of this only to find out he was being set up by all the but players all along. So we're presupposed to the fact that this was all a master rouse from the start and that John's character just "happens" to find the kid in the cascino as his unwitting accomplice? Give me a freaking break.I'm all for the suspension of disbelief when watching movies, but this was too much to ask the viewer. There are a dozen other ways to have contrived an justifiable plot without putting the viewers through the ordeal and offering the surprise at the end. This just sucked. I was angry that I had spent my time to watch it- I highly advise that you save yours and pass on this lump of dirt.

Pookyiscute I was going to give this a 7, but by the time I got to the end, I automatically gave it one point up, just for being so clever. The film is a classic con-artist flick, and those are awesome to watch. They make you think, and they're fun.John C. Reilly, although he was good as usual, just didn't make a good leading man. It's not only that he doesn't have the right face for it, but it's everything else about him too. Not the right voice, personality and charisma that another actor might. He's a terrific character actor, and perhaps that's why they gave him this role, because it is a character driven part, but, the difference is, that he's carrying the movie basically on his own, and for him, it just didn't work really well. His co-star was excellent, and cute to boot. I saw him in one another film. 'The Terminal' with Tom Hanks, but that's the only other film I've ever seen him in. There is some Spanish in it, too which made the film a little more interesting, and the directing was just artsy enough to give it a little bit of flavor. However, there were times when the film was a little dry and could of used a bit of seasoning, if you catch my drift.Maggie Gyllanhaal was great, and well casted for this part. I think she is a very overlooked actress and in a way follows Johnny Depp's paths, as a somewhat newcomer to Hollywood, picking films that are more interesting than cliché or stereotypical Hollywood, so to speak.The film itself though, was well-written, and other than the mistake of John C. Reilly as I said before in the lead, it was well-casted also. There is, other than some foul language from time to time, nothing to be offended by, no sexual content, no nudity, and no violence. With that, I will say it's one of the better interesting films I've seen in a long time, and will keep it in mind for recommending it to people that I see. And, I recommend it, in fact, right now, to you!

Ebert Nueve Reinas, the original story, is so much better, that is difficult to see that copy. Why Hollywood insist in don't translate the dialogs of the foreign films that American audiences could like, and release them? What is the reason that they are so f..... chauvinists? The rest of those lines is only to fill that obligatory rule of ten lines. Why ten? Why not twelve or fifteen? Maybee is the same reason for the actual blockbusters have 120 minutes or more. If you could't tell a story in 90 minutes, forget'it. I'm tired of those idiot "epilogues" that don't do nothing to the film narrative. Blá, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.