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100There have been many good movies about gambling, but never one that so single-mindedly shows the gambler at his task.
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100In the acting department, there's nobody on the current scene with more sheer talent --- or offbeat charisma -- than Philip Seymour Hoffman, in whose bearish body nestles the heart of a lithe and limber artist.
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91Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny's addiction to instant money as something dirty and private and, at the same time, soul-quickening.
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Unusual, as such movies go, in its disregard for busy theatricality.
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80Atlantic City casino boss played with pointedly corrupt amusement by John Hurt, doesn't merely oversee hell but gets a real kick out of the damned.
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80As channeled by the extraordinary Hoffman, Dan Mahowny is less a freak than a nerve-deadened Everyman with the courage to search for something that makes him feel alive.
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80Kwietniowski has managed to create a surprisingly engrossing and suspenseful narrative without resorting to cosmetics, melodrama or hype.
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80Kwietniowski follows up his impressive debut feature, "Love and Death on Long Island," with this equally absorbing study of a compulsive personality.
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78The situation is not too far removed from that of Jayson Blair and The New York Times. The corporate oversight in place to catch deceptions is lulled into becoming part of the deception. Mahowny wanders through this film as if waiting to get caught, forced into deeper gambling debt because no one applies any brakes.
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75Kwietniowski turns up the tension so incrementally, we don't realize the scope of Mahowny's moral wreck until it is too late.
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75An unflashy but fascinating meditation on addiction and greed. The junkie was clearly Mahowny, but the greed, in a way, was everybody else's: the bankers', their flush clientele's, and the casinos', all busy feeding his habit.
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75A fascinating fact-based portrait of a gambling addict.
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75At its best, Mahowny is intricate, engrossing, wryly funny, and strangely poetic.
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75This may be the quietest addict ever to hit movie screens, as well the most disturbing.
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75Owning Mahowny may at times feel futile in its colorless, disheartening subject matter, but that's the point -- to see how barren Mahowny's life becomes. Hoffman gives the film relevance.
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70Hoffman has his specialty, though, and it’s not inappropriate here: He always looks supersmart and yet his reactions to what goes on around him are superslow.
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70Another actor might not have been able to carry the film, given such a creepily monomaniacal character, but Hoffman lets the humanity soak through, registering split seconds of panic when he's on the verge of getting caught, then just as quickly creating and working a new plan.
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70Owning Mahowny shares the earlier ("Love and Death on Long Island") film's crisp precision, but it's a far more rigorously sublimated and abstract account of l'amour fou.
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70Kwietniowski might have tried for some edginess that would express a measure of the excitement Mahowny is experiencing. Despite the driven intensity of the banker, the film threatens to slip into the lifelessness of the drab world it depicts.
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63Hoffman is a fine actor in a rut, working on a string of socially alienated characters who are variations on the same theme. That's too bad, because the story being told around his static presence is amazing.
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63Hurt, who starred in Kwietniowski's earlier study in compulsion, "Life and Death on Long Island," is oily perfection as the devious Victor.
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63There are some effectively suspenseful moments in the movie, particularly during the gambling sequences, but one longs for more context and probing into the psyche of an ordinary man with an extraordinary compulsion.
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60Just doesn't give us enough to hold onto, perhaps partly because it's executed with so much restraint and subtlety. It's often a tense, uncomfortable little movie.
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60There could have been life in the material, but no one involved save Hurt and Collins seems to have taken the time to find it.
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60Whatever minor entertainment there is to be gleaned from Mahowny -- set in the early 1980's, mostly in Toronto -- comes in bits and pieces.
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58After its irresistible first act, Owning Mahowny loses its energy and focus very fast.
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50Hoffman confessed he was drawn to the role because ''this was a guy who didn't know how to feel, and I found that fascinating.'' His challenge is our frustration
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50Ironically, it's most engaging when the focus shifts to Hurt's matter-of-factly amoral enabler, whose glistening suits and jewel-colored shirt-and-tie combinations suggest a particularly poisonous tropical reptile.
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50Philip Seymour Hoffman and John Hurt give compelling performances... But the coldly unrewarding drama is as distant and joyless as its protagonist, representing a disappointment for director Richard Kwietniowski.
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