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Good Shepherd, The
Universal Pictures


6.5

based on 33 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 118 votes
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Rate this movie

FILM:

A Bronx Tale

MPAA RATING: R for some violence, sexuality and language

Starring Matt Damon, Robert De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, Alec Baldwin, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, and Timothy Hutton

The tumultuous early history of the Central Intelligence Agency is viewed through the prism of one man's life in this espionage drama. (Universal Pictures)

GENRE(S):	Drama \| Romance \| Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	Eric Roth
DIRECTED BY:	Robert De Niro
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: April 3, 2007 Theatrical: December 22, 2006
RUNNING TIME:	160 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

The New Yorker David Denby

One of the most impressive movies ever made about espionage.

100

San Francisco Examiner Walter Addiego

A remarkable study of the corrosive effects of fear and power on an establishment insider who puts duty above all else.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's the type of film that may be forgiven its imperfections when they are compared with the vastness of its accomplishments.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

De Niro pulls the viewer into the world he has created and holds him there, sometimes spellbound, until the story is over and the end credits roll.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

While a bit unwieldy at nearly three hours and at times slow going, the film is absolutely fascinating for anyone who shares De Niro's passions.

Time Richard Corliss/Richard Schickel

Damon is terrific in the role--all-knowing, never overtly expressing a feeling. Indeed, so is everyone else in this intricate, understated but ultimately devastating account of how secrets, when they are left to fester, can become an illness, dangerous to those who keep them, more so to nations that base their policies on them.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

It's taken a dozen years for Eric Roth's smart, thoughtful, psychologically complicated script to reach the screen under Robert De Niro's careful and methodical direction, and it is easy to see why.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Roth's screenplay, steeped in the peculiar rituals, lock-jawed repression and smug sense of superiority of the WASP ruling class that both shaped America's intelligence community and made it vulnerable, is less interested in derring-do than back-room deals and the day-to-day drudgery of spying, driven by the notion that espionage is a cynical high-stakes game played with people's lives and the ante is human decency and connectedness.

USA Today Claudia Puig

Deliberately paced, epic and ambitious, The Good Shepherd feels related in tone, mood and style to "The Godfather."

Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer

The problem with The Good Shepherd is that it's a closed-off movie about a closed-off individual. Wilson is inscrutable from the get-go, and remains so. Damon does subtle work within the narrowest of confines.

Entertainment Weekly Scott Brown

Here, he's (Damon) the ultimate enigma machine, a man willing to erase himself for his country. Does that make him a hero? The Good Shepherd is too closemouthed to let on.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A cool-headed thriller, and a richly detailed character study that traces the birth and evolution of America's foreign espionage bureaucracy, The Good Shepherd also marks a significantly more mature, assured directing turn from Robert De Niro.

Newsweek David Ansen

Still, even if the movie's vast reach exceeds its grasp, it's a spellbinding history lesson. The Good Shepherd demands you watch it like a spy: alert, paranoid, never knowing whom you can trust, or who will stab you in the back.

Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips

It's fitting that a drama trading in classified information would turn out to be such a cryptic bugger.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Shepherd wants to say something profound about the effect of a deceitful government on human values. But it's tough to slog through a movie that has no pulse.

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

Leaves you longing for the other, better political thrillers it evokes.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Even with its first-rate cast, current political relevance and tangled mysteries, The Good Shepherd remains as remote as Wilson himself. But frankly, if the lives of CIA spies are really this dreary, they may as well keep their secrets to themselves.

Empire Kim Newman

Well-crafted and well-acted, but ever-so-slightly worthy and strangely unaffecting. Given the track record of the CIA, it probably ought to be angrier.

The New York Times Manohla Dargis

The most interesting thing about The Good Shepherd is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

In some ways, De Niro does a competent job in his second directorial effort but his characterizations are clumsy, and his members of the Power Elite always seem less real people than stick figures in a propaganda movie.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

If only De Niro or screenwriter Eric Roth had the instinct to play some of this for laughs or even outrageous burlesque. Despite their conviction and intelligence and their game, amazing cast, all they do is eke out a series of straight-faced dramatic reversals and personal betrayals that leave the dramatis personae, and the audience, numb.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

A glacially paced, emotionally frosty epic (with a top-drawer cast).

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

The Good Shepherd, soft when it needs to be sharp, is all cloak with very little dagger.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

If serious intent led inevitably to greatness, The Good Shepherd would be a masterpiece. It turtles forward for 160 minutes with unrelenting, humorless solemnity, as if everyone involved were unaware that it has arrived three decades too late to matter.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

The Good Shepherd, for all its noble intentions, manages to make even espionage boring.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

De Niro made the right choice in making this a film of cold, gray Leiters rather than dynamic Bonds. But he never makes us feel the chill.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

Where's 007 when you need him? Neither shaken nor stirred, The Good Shepherd is a flat draft of history that looks at the Central Intelligence Agency's early years through the horn-rimmed gaze of a fictional spook.

Chicago Reader Andrea Gronvall

Perhaps it's fitting that a movie about the early CIA be tangled and opaque, but this drama loosely based on the life of uberspook James Angleton verges on incoherence.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Despite successfully creating the illusion of forbidden glimpses, The Good Shepherd slogs through most of its lengthy running time.

Village Voice Robert Wilonsky

The Good Shepherd needed to be either considerably longer -- more like 1979's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" miniseries -- or considerably shorter (word has it De Niro cut 30 minutes). Right now, it's stuck in the deadly dull middle in which everything happens but nothing matters since the filmmakers can't stick with one event or idea long enough for it to, well, stick.

Variety Staff (Not credited)

Robert De Niro's second film as a director adopts a methodical approach and deliberate pace in attempting to grasp an almost forbiddingly intricate subject, with a result that is not boring, exactly, but undeniably tedious.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

De Niro is damned if he's going to make a standard thriller out of this view from within the CIA, which might be refreshing if his solemn moral parable weren't so lacking in any other kind of juice, and if its hero were less of a round-shouldered, whey-faced organization man.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.5 (out of 10) based on 118 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

J. S. gave it a0:
To a teenager, this would be (and it is) an extremely boring movie. The movie focuses on one thing: a man and his boring life as a CIA operative. Although, it is intended for older audiences, but it doesn't please the action-movie goers who look for spy shootouts, automatic pick-ups of beautiful women, and, of course, a diabolical villain. Not a good choice to buy or rent. I made this mistake.

Bruce gave it a6:
Marginally better than average cold war spy movie. I don't think Damon is a very lively actor at the best of times, but he works out okay here as a colorless government man. Jolie seems kind of wasted in what's a relatively minor role. I enjoyed the spy intrigue but thought the acting was somewhat flat in spots, and felt that some important plot points were not telegraphed well. Overall, a 6 out of 10.

[Anonymous] gave it a3:
Poor sound, difficult to hear the dialogue. Fragmented story line.

Gail F. gave it a10:
The Good Sheppard is complex and fooregoes spy thriller techniques in order to accurately portray an organization embedded inScull and Bones and capable of anything, and destructive to the welfare of this country.

Sam gave it a9:
This film -- which I watched again last night for a second time -- is clearly not your typical spy thriller movie that many reviewers seem to have expected. It's too bad that more people don't have patience for careful filmmaking, thoughful exposition, great acting, and extraordinary ambiguity. This is the genius of the story and how DeNiro realized it. What many seem to complain about -- it is slow, it is enigmatic, it is confusing, it is even dull -- is true, in the same sense that reading LeCarre is slow, enigmatic, confusing, and even dull. But let that not detract from a powerful evocation -- a much truer evocation than most "spy" movies -- of what espionage is all about, and the true human emotions that must be faced and overcome (or not) by a protagonist in Wilson (Damon's) position. This is a psychological thriller of great magnitude that probably suffered by being marketed as a spy movie. Painstakingly made, detailed, and very true to the human experience if not the Bond one. I like Bond, and Bourne, but for gut-wrenching truth, give me more movies like this. A tour de force. Damon is terrific, Angelina Jolie perfectly cast as either the jilted spouse or the conniving college girl ensuring her future by entrapping a promising husband. She's both. It's an enigma -- the movie is an enigma, and life is an enigma. Nothing is what it seems to anyone at the time -- and this is perfectly conveyed throughout this excellent movie.

Bruno A gave it a9:
I only just saw The Good Shepherd, some weeks after its release here in France. I thought it was excellent. Was anyone else struck by the importance of father/son relationships in the film? I agree that Matt Damon doesn't look old enough to be a father (at his son's wedding, for example), and that his character is emotionally cold and totally unfatherly. But so many relationships in the film were based on this theme, or on the theme of abandonment by the father. Maybe I'm just projecting my own issues, but I found the film all the richer for this.

Tom M. gave it a3:
A movie tracing the early origins and eventual development of what we now know as the CIA, with performances by Robert DeNiro, Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, William Hurt, and Alec Baldwin--including bit parts by Timothy Dalton and Joe Pesci--certainly appears to have the elements of a very promising and intriguing film that couldn't possibly miss. Yet, that's precisely what happens here. Muddled dialogue in scene after scene, baffling story structure, one serious case of miscasting (Eddie Redmayne as the main character's son), unreadable graphics, and film editing that must have been phoned in all combine for a major disappointment. Strangely, after I viewed it, I couldn't help thinking of Ted Williams, who many believe to be the greatest hitter of all time, yet he was a surprising flop as a manager. Could it be that DeNiro, who many consider our finest living actor, is doomed to the same fate when it comes to directing? Hey, Bobby, give Scorsese a call.

Good Shepherd, The Universal Pictures

Good Shepherd, The
Universal Pictures