Shaft

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

This may be the first movie that runs under two hours and yet has no attention span. Characters are abandoned and picked up; narrative threads dissolve before your very eyes.

Baltimore Sun by Ann Hornaday

There's good trash: throwaway, intellectually undemanding action movies that, despite their heavy body counts and hard edges, are executed with a touch of class and a sunny disposition.

Philadelphia Inquirer by Carrie Rickey

Shaft is still enormously involving. It's popcorn, but very fresh.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

The main thing the new Shaft gets right is casting for the title role. It's too bad the rest of the film doesn't hold your attention the way he does.

TV Guide Magazine by Maitland McDonagh

It's a bad sign when audience enthusiasm peaks during the credits sequence.

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

Shaft scores by lacing ba-da-boom action with social pertinence.

Variety by Robert Koehler

Samuel L. Jackson instantly takes the mantle from Mr. Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, and runs with it on pure style and charisma.

TNT RoughCut by Susannah Breslin

Singleton's lack of influence makes Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" look far funkier in comparison.

San Francisco Examiner by Wesley Morris

The movie's primary narrative weakness is that its racism plot points seem ripped from the headlines of a "Geraldo" newsletter and stretched into a string of terribly executed car chases.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold

Essentially works, even though the script is a mess and John Singleton's direction is often clumsy and heavy-handed to an annoying degree.