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90Infamous gives you the unique opportunity to see how two sets of filmmakers can take exactly the same story, make extremely tough though different choices in emphasis and tone and achieve brilliant movies.
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90Less a parable of literary ethics than a showcase of literary personality, and it is in the end more touching than troubling.
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90Jones gets everything--the gestures, the generosity, the mean streak, the bending of the ear to recitals of woe, whether across a lunch table or a prison cell. He even nails the voice, like that of a chorister caught running a racket with the incense.
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88Dizzy with celebrity, New York society and gay life (if all that isn't the same thing), Infamous is more fun. But "Capote" is a better movie.
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80While less beguiling than "Capote," Infamous remains a soulful and searching portrayal of the writer, carried with immense charm and vivacity by its leading man.
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80Infamous is the better Capote film, yes, but also the less easily digestible one, the more eccentric one and -- yes -- the gayer one.
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80Though it's not as good as the brilliant "Capote," it's nevertheless a riveting, well-made picture.
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78Infamous successfully captures a sense of the loneliness of a writer's life.
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75I don't know if that makes Infamous a better movie, but it's certainly as good and a lot more fun. British actor Toby Jones is so physically right in the role, you'll think Capote is playing himself.
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75"Capote" is serious, deep and unadorned in the manner of the 1967 movie adaptation of the writer's true-crime novel "In Cold Blood." And Infamous boasts the high-gloss frivolity of the 1961 film version of Capote's "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
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75Watch Infamous on its own. It's a worthy film in its own right, with its own virtues.
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75Overall, McGrath's film has superior star power (including Gwyneth Paltrow in a one-scene role as a Peggy Lee-like chanteuse), is franker about the sexual nature of Capote's fascination with the murderous Smith and his sad, strangled dreams, and spends more time establishing Capote's glittering New York life before setting him adrift in the heartland.
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75It's a stellar cast, but you can't help but lament the bad timing.
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75The pleasure of Infamous is in its gallery of larger-than-life portrayals.
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75"Capote" is the more intellectual of the two films; Infamous is the more emotional. They exist to complement, not eclipse, one another.
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75Ultimately, the problem with Infamous isn't that it revisits Capote's turf--it's that it does the same things well, and leaves the same unsatisfying holes.
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70Neither movie (Capote/Infamous) gives you the whole picture, but it's fun to see them both and rearrange the pieces in your head.
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It's just a lesser version, light in weight and absent the ache that permeated the movie for which Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Academy Award. It can't withstand the comparisons. It's good, especially during its first half, just not good enough.
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70Writer-director Douglas McGrath's boldest stroke is to impose a more overtly gay interpretation on a central relationship in which the attraction was generally supposed to be unspoken.
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70The film benefits from three splendid performances: Toby Jones as Capote, an aggressively gay elf exuding a tosspot charm; Sandra Bullock as Nelle Harper Lee, a novelist who uses spoken words with quiet precision, and Daniel Craig as Perry, a deluded monster who is nonetheless forthright and strong.
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70McGrath says that he considers his film to be lighter in tone than TC 1, which is baffling. The reverse seems the case.
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67The added value that writer-director Douglas McGrath has in mind is gossip -- and a goggly interest in gossip becomes the glittering gimmick of Infamous.
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67Compared to "Capote," this new film is altogether lighter.
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67A garish and fascinating little movie that comes bouncing in the wake of Bennett Miller's "Capote" like a yipping puppy trying to keep up with an elegant show dog.
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67The only difference between the two films is that this one chronicles Capote's New York environment in more detail (and with humorous interludes), and it's a tad lighter in tone and perhaps a bit less high-horse condemning of its subject's literary ethics.
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63The film's most pleasing surprise is the beautifully nuanced portrait of Capote's confidante, "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee, by Sandra Bullock. You heard me. Bullock gives the film what it otherwise lacks: the ring of truth.
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63Though stylistically all over the place, it's not without interest.
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63Understanding what McGrath is trying to pull off is not the same thing as McGrath pulling it off; as ambitious as it is, Infamous falters in execution too often to create a lasting impression.
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63Flashy, fun, shallow, easy-going and without a hope of brilliance.
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50McGrath makes literal what the other movie only hinted at -- that Perry falls in love with Capote -- turning the relationship between author and subject into something far less complicated and more mundane.
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50Infamous, which mines almost the exact same ground as "Capote," comes up 300 days late and artistically close to bankruptcy.
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50It bears roughly the same resemblance to the Bennett Miller-Dan Futterman-Philip Seymour Hoffman masterpiece as the now-forgotten "Valmont" did to "Dangerous Liaisons."
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50The problem is that the first half of Infamous is nowhere near as comic as McGrath intends. Instead the picture gives off a tone of arch stylization that plays as artificial, overwrought and off-putting.
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50Infamous has dramaturgical strengths, whether or not it gets the facts right. Jones's performance as Capote tends to be delivered in a monotone, yet thanks to Craig all of their scenes together are potently realized.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 23 out of 25
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Mixed: 0 out of 25
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Negative: 2 out of 25
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trishc10
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TitoO.0