Unlawful Entry

Time Out by

Solid performances lend weight to the flakier elements, with Liotta turning crazed excess into something wild.

Chicago Tribune by Clifford Terry

By the time the boundaries between innocence and injuriousness have been drawn, it is apparent that the film could greatly benefit from more doubt than certainty.

Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum

An efficient little thriller that imparts loads of queasiness and reasonable amounts of suspense while serving as an excellent corrective to the shameless celebrations of LA police power and brutality in Lethal Weapon 3.

Austin Chronicle by Kathleen Maher

Oddly enough, Unlawful Entry can keep you from sleeping but when you wake up the next moring, it's hard to remember much about the movie.

Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman

An efficient, intense formula thriller.

Washington Post by Rita Kempley

But this hackneyed stalker-rama, which pretends to be a call for gun control, ultimately is little more than an excuse to turn the bad guy into a human colander. The better to strain the moral pasta.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The movie is a thriller, with all the usual trappings of a thriller, but the director, Jonathan Kaplan, is able to place the story in a plausible world. The performances go for unstrained realism, the settings are slice-of-life, and until the final scenes even the sicko cop seems somewhere within the realm of possibility.

Variety by Todd McCarthy

Although it exists primarily to send an audience into a bloodthirsty frenzy and has major credibility problems in the bargain, "Unlawful Entry" is still a very effective victimization thriller. Strongly following the "Fatal Attraction" pattern--to the point of having a very similar climax--well-crafted concoction trades in the sorts of elemental concerns and fears that get people mightily worked up. This, combined with controversy pic may engender based on its prominent plot element of excessive police violence, gives it the potential to become a summer sleeper hit.