Boxoffice Magazine by Pam Grady

Control's Sam Riley steps into a role made unforgettable by a young Richard Attenborough in the 1947 original and makes it his own, slipping into the character like a second skin.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

What might have been a long walk off a short pier becomes a valid, vital rethinking of a crime classic.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Calvin Wilson

Doesn't rise to classic status, but it's an intriguing mood piece.

USA Today by Claudia Puig

While the two leads emerge soulless as melodrama hovers around the edges of the tale, the era is convincingly portrayed and the melancholy mood is hauntingly rendered.

Christian Science Monitor by Peter Rainer

Joffe for the most part amps up the melodrama without tearing Greene's complex weave, but everything unravels toward the end with some staggeringly bad staging. It's as if the film itself had been mugged.

NPR by Bob Mondello

You can't accuse the new Brighton Rock of being untrue to the book - it actually reinstates the novel's climax, placing violent events back atop a cliff as Greene had originally, rather than on the Brighton Pier, as he had in his screenplay.

Wall Street Journal by John Anderson

The film is almost distractingly beautiful to look at, something that accentuates the tension between the film's conflicting quantities, i.e., the glories of the physical world, and the corrupted humanity it hosts.

The New York Times by Stephen Holden

By discarding most of the theological debate, the movie is no longer a passion play but a gritty and despairing noir. That's good enough for me.

Movieline by S.T. Vanairsdale

Where Joffe purposely departs from "Brighton Rock" deprives his movie of the book's most revelatory element: Faith. Gorgeous, ambitious and daring as it often is, Brighton Rock has no soul.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

I know the novel, and as dark as this film is, I believe it hesitates to follow Greene into his dark abyss. It is about helplessness and evil, but isn't merciless enough.

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

Rowan Joffe (son of Roland Joffe) provides busy, if never particularly distinctive direction, but it's the leads that continually threaten to sink the film.

Chicago Reader by J.R. Jones

Joffe, a British screenwriter (The American, 28 Weeks Later) debuting as director, hits some of these notes in his adaptation of Brighton Rock, but the movie's religious flourishes seem more rhetorical than heartfelt.

Village Voice

The leads are compelling and the chase and fight scenes - scored to a propulsive bass-drum beat - are kinetic, but as Brighton Rock attempts to zero in on Rose and Pinkie's dangerous relationship, it loses momentum.

The New Yorker by David Denby

The extreme innocence of Rose (Andrea Riseborough), the young girl whom Pinkie seduces in order to keep her quiet, is no longer very convincing, or even interesting.

Variety by Justin Chang

Joffe's first feature never shakes off the feel of a telepic with above-average production values, and its unsteady lead performances and often garish stylistic touches make a muddle of the source material's psychological acuity.

The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett

Rowan Joffe's film of Graham Greene's 1938 novel "Brighton Rock" takes a gothic approach to the story of a young thug obsessed with hell with little of the writer's subtlety and too much reliance on a loud quasi-religious choral score.

Slant Magazine by Bill Weber

Brighton Rock never brings its baby-faced hood antihero, the scarfaced Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley, pouting and hunched in the late-DiCaprio manner), into a semblance of human plausibility.