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63I 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.
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70By 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.
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75While 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.
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50Joffe, 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.
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75Joffe 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.
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50Although Joffe appears to be making a Brighton version of the seductively natty evil we find stateside in "Boardwalk Empire," this Brighton Rock remains muffled, half-formed pulp fiction.
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50Graham Greene's guilt-and-gangsters tale "Brighton Rock" gets an even more melodramatic telling than in the 1947 film version courtesy of first-time director Rowan Joffe, whose histrionic adaptation screams "student film" with practically every frame.
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50There's a lovely moment with Mirren and John Hurt that helps send Brighton Rock toward its final note of tenderness. With so much style to burn, Joffe handles the tinge of Greene-ian ambivalence just right.
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58Rowan Joffe (son of Roland Joffe) provides busy, if never particularly distinctive direction, but it's the leads that continually threaten to sink the film.
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60Though he has a true appreciation for detail, Joffe has the scar-faced Pinkie so scurvy that Rose ought to run the minute she sees him.
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50The 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.
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80What might have been a long walk off a short pier becomes a valid, vital rethinking of a crime classic.
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50Joffe'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.
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50Richard Attenborough nailed that purity 64 years ago, and Sam Riley nails it now. His Pinkie is a slim, mesmerizing package of immaculate and undiluted evil, clear as a stick of Brighton Rock candy.
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70You 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.
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50This Brighton Rock doesn't live up to the greatness of the novel (or even, really, the very-goodness of the 1947 movie), but it doesn't betray Greene's book either, which may be all a reasonable reader and filmgoer could ask.
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50Rowan 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.
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75Doesn't rise to classic status, but it's an intriguing mood piece.
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50Joffe's biggest mistake isn't visual, it's chronological. What makes Pinkie so terrifying in the novel is that he's just 17.
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100Control'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.
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38Brighton 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.
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70The 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.
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65Where 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.
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Aug 23, 201150The 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.