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88Noir has never been this bright.
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90One of the compulsively watchable films this year, second only to "Memento." It's a must-see, except for those with a sensitivity to on-screen mayhem.
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100A vicious horror flick with an actual beast and someone who just acts like one.
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88These are hard men. They could have the "Sopranos" for dinner, throw up and have them again.
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88A noir masterpiece with Oscar-caliber performances, Sexy Beast slowly turns up the heat until we squirm.
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88It is a riveting and memorable performance and Kingsley finds subtlety in Logan where there doesn't seem to be any.
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75A smart, funny, stylish and very violent British gangster movie.
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70The main event is the Mamet-esque battle of foul words between vintage hard-case Ray Winstone and the seething sociopath played by Ben Kingsley.
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78It smarts, and shocks, and just for a moment blows your mind.
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100Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.''
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It's all jolly bad fun, but the primo aspect of the exercise is the phenomenally intense performance by Kingsley as a careening sociopath who is every bit as dangerous to his friends as to his foes.
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75Plays in spots something like a stage play smartly brought to screen.
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100An extraordinary and original creation. It belongs alongside "Amores Perros" and "Memento" on a shortlist of 2001's most exciting revelations.
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90A flashy, nasty triumph
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90Kingsley creates an unforgettable monster. Acting rarely gets this hypnotically explosive.
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90There are long stretches in Sexy Beast that are so exhilarating it feels churlish to dwell on its flaws.
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90Though it can overreach for emotional effect and overplay its hand at times -- Sexy Beast brings considerable virtues to telling this tale, including a great eye for faces and director Glazer's palpable excitement at working in the feature medium.
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90He's (Kingsley) pure violence, a sociopath who radiates menace even while sitting perfectly still mouthing pleasantries.
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90The movie is riotously entertaining, and with a big heart, too.
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80Glazer shoots with the dreamy impressionism much favored in his principal line of work, all floaty slo-mos and in-your-face close-ups punctuated by a hard-driving rock score.
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80A Molotov cocktail of a movie, an engaging conflagration of British B-flick, cockney wit and gallows humor. There's even a delicate little love story in there.
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70Often enjoyable, massively uneven Brit ganglander with an almost surreal approach to the genre.
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40Drove violence to the point of redundancy.
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10In the end, I'm wondering what's so special about a film that has but one guilty pleasure and that's Ben Kingsley spraying saliva-lubricated variants of the F-word into the atmosphere like anti-aircraft fire for 10 solid minutes.
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88Glazer has a daring sense of story structure that ratchets up the suspense, and his sense for sardonic black comedy is unerring.
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75Slightly misshapen and unbalanced, with a few loose ends, a few extraneous dream sequences. But there's something going on all the time.
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63Kingsley gives the movie a jolt and blows the rest of it to pieces.
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80Confident, mature, deeply conceived, and convincingly inhabited, it's a surprisingly humane film -- despite the close-range shotgun spray.
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90A demonstration of bravura acting.
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80Appeal lies on the bright, shiny surface of its ostensibly simple plot, and in its rat-a-tat-tat language, which often sounds like Mamet-visits-Spyne.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 28 out of 39
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Mixed: 4 out of 39
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Negative: 7 out of 39
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10
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