80
Impassioned, engaging and eloquently constructed, City of Lies has much more to offer than first meets the eye.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
42
In practice, City of Lies is so understandably overwhelmed by the sprawling mystery at its core that it never figures out what to ask of either history or itself. Or how.
30
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
The look is grimy and the atmosphere is grim; but what could have been a moody character study or a taut conspiracy thriller is instead a dreary procedural, a misbegotten mush of flashbacks, voice-overs and dead ends.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
This is a compelling drama with real-world concerns that shouldn't be ignored, and it deserves better than to be the victim of an actor's offscreen sins.
50
Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray
As the piles of Biggie-related material has proven, it’s perhaps impossible to cover everything this story is really about in under two hours. City of Lies makes an honest effort but doesn’t get the job done.
40
The truth is out there, but when pot and kettle go to battle, Hollywood best be careful using the term City of Lies to describe anything other than itself.
75
Chicago Sun-Times by Richard Roeper
Still, in large part due to the stellar work from Depp and Whitaker, this is a valuable and somewhat illuminating look back at the senseless, stunning killings of two rap icons just six months apart.
50
The performances are solid, and the early scenes — recreating the crimes, etc. — are fascinating at a documentary level. Setting up the context is useful, a PD under a cloud and determined to avoid race riots that might return if dirty cops were in on all this. But the rabbit hole closed in for me about an hour in.
40
Familiar execution and drab characters conspire to drain this vital story of its intensity.
50
Even as its ambitions are laudable in casting a wide net over a variety of societal ills, the film can’t quite muster the will to follow through on those ambitions and instead succumbs too often to cliche when complexity was required.