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100Heat is in the cop-movie pantheon with Akira Kurosawa's "High and Low," and that's as "right" as the genre gets.
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100One of the most intelligent crime-thrillers to come along in years.
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100A sleek, accomplished piece of work, meticulously controlled and completely involving. The dark end of the street doesn't get much more inviting than this.
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100Stunningly made and incisively acted by a large and terrific cast, Michael Mann's ambitious study of the relativity of good and evil stands apart from other films of its type by virtue of its extraordinarily rich characterizations and its thoughtful, deeply melancholy take on modern life.
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90A stunning crime drama that shares its protagonists' rabid attention to detail—and love of adrenalin.
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90As with his other works, [Mann] binds sound, music and pictures into one hypnotic triaxial cable and plugs it right into your brain. He makes this almost-three-hour experience practically glide by.
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88Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with cliches.
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88A love-hate poem to L.A., and when Mann takes in the streets, the freeways and LAX, he doesn't give us shiny "Lethal Weapon"-style travelogues. He shows us an L.A. that's grim, bare, a bit smoggy and ruled by street smarts. [15 Dec 1995]
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88No, the film may not be quite as luminous as the cast, but it's good - very good, in fact.
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80It didn't sound like fun to us, either, but we were wrong; Heat scores on many fronts...The plot, though it seems to ramble, builds suspense with deft precision, and the action set pieces are triumphs.
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80A lot of very good actors...do honest, probing work in a context where, typically, less will do.
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80There's nothing really new...but it has craft, pacing, and an overall sense of proportion, three pretty rare classic virtues nowadays.
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75It's a monster of a movie, and it gets unwieldy.
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70Someone should confiscate Mann's synthesizer. Just when a scene starts rolling along, this synth beat fades in and destroys the mood.
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67We're not watching McCauley and Hanna anymore; we're watching De Niro and Pacino trying to out-insinuate each other. For a few moments, Heat truly has some.
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60A cool and rather detached movie...Heat generates lots of energy but gives off little light.
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Ultimately, though, the movie never transcends the limitations of its Hemingwayesque, men-with-men attitudes.
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50The performances are persuasive but the plot rattles on much too long.
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There isn't much to recommend this movie until Pacino and De Niro finally share the first of their two scenes together.
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50I lost track of how many times I checked my watch during the nearly three interminable hours it took Heat to play itself to a predictable conclusion of a chase scene and a shoot-out.
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50Its sensational looks pale beside storytelling weaknesses that expose the more soulless aspects of this cat-and-mouse crime tale. [15 Dec 1995]
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30A 3 hour fusillade of cliches.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 30 out of 33
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Mixed: 0 out of 33
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Negative: 3 out of 33
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