Good Shepherd, The

The New Yorker David Denby

One of the most impressive movies ever made about espionage.

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.