100
Intelligent and challenging: Mann's crime epic could take two viewings to fully absorb, but it's worth every devoted minute.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
Yet, for all its skill, Public Enemies is not quite a great movie. There’s something missing--a sense of urgency and discovery, a more complicated narrative path, a shrewder, tougher sense of who John Dillinger is.
50
The Hollywood Reporter by Kirk Honeycutt
The film lacks the juice promised by the teaming of such extraordinary filmmakers with a cast as large as a Hooverville encampment.
50
Disappointing, curiously uninvolving.
75
Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips
It's a fascinating bundle of contradictions -- authentic in a million details, deeply romanticized in others. Cool, calm and collected, this is more love story than gangster picture.
88
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
Public Enemies comes at you like Dillinger did: all of a sudden. It's movie dynamite.
88
Miami Herald by Rene Rodriguez
Michael Mann's extraordinary Public Enemies is an unusual sort of gangster picture, a near-impressionistic recreation of the last year in the life of one of American history's most notorious bank robbers.
50
It lacks overall focus, and at the end you may have a question for Michael Mann: Why'dyou bother? [July 6, 2009, p.59]
88
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
This is a very good film, with Depp and Bale performances of brutal clarity. I'm trying to understand why it is not quite a great film. I think it may be because it deprives me of some stubborn need for closure.
50
Oddly, too, the film is somewhat shortchanged by its great star, Johnny Depp, who disappointingly has chosen to play Dillinger as self-consciously cool rather than earthy and gregarious.