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Silver City
Metascore
47 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 36 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 13 out of 36
  2. Mixed: 13 out of 36
  3. Negative: 10 out of 36
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  1. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    100
    Leaving aside Huston's bland acting and a few other flaws, Sayles's politically charged drama raises a rousing number of issues and ideas, inviting us to ponder them and draw our own conclusions.
  2. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    88
    The movie's strength, then, is not in its outrage, but in its cynicism and resignation.
  3. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    88
    That Sayles is able to say these things in the context of a compelling story with well-defined characters makes this one of the early fall triumphs of 2004.
  4. Empire
    Reviewed by: Angie Errigo
    80
    Smart, intriguing, funny and sad, with some primo wisecracking dialogue.
  5. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    75
    The real action in Silver City happens on the fringes, where the mischief is. Daryl Hannah is spice incarnate as Dickie's sexy screw-up sister. Billy Zane plays a lobbyist with insinuating soullessness. And Dreyfuss feasts on the snappiest lines.
  6. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    75
    It comes off as a fairly straightforward assault on the kind of political corruption that has crossed party lines in movies since the dawn of the medium, and in books before that. The pleasure here is in the dialogue, the characters and the cast.
  7. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Megan Lehmann
    75
    A wickedly sexy Daryl Hannah is particularly memorable as the Pilager family's black sheep Maddy.
  8. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: William Arnold
    75
    An effective political lampoon.
  9. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    70
    It's a cracking good detective yarn with hints of "Chinatown" and Raymond Chandler, and it's a sharp political lampoon of things we're all reading about on today's front pages.
  10. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Tasha Robinson
    70
    Sayles' version of reality is grim, but it provides an enlightening, grounding reminder that there's a far more crucial world of politics going on behind the headlines.
  11. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Robert K. Elder
    63
    It's a dense, winding tale with all of Sayles' razor-sharp dialogue and intrigue. But instead of tracing character paths, Sayles sacrifices solid storytelling in favor of forwarding a political (and environmental) ideology.
  12. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Connie Ogle
    63
    Huston, unfortunately, is never really believable as a man rediscovering lost principles; he feels out of place in this otherwise fine ensemble.
  13. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    63
    Though there's nothing wrong with moral outrage, it doesn't always aid the telling of a complex story. More subtlety might have worked better.
  14. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    60
    Pointed, unsubtle political satire.
  15. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Heidi Martinuzzi
    60
    Slow paced, but interesting.
  16. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Ruthe Stein
    50
    Wildly uneven, with long stretches as dull as Dickie.
  17. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    50
    Long, windy, diffuse in its message and blunt in its satire.
  18. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    50
    There's definitely ore to be mined in Silver City but Sayles' pan comes up with only particles of dust.
  19. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    50
    The satire doesn't go far enough.
  20. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    50
    Using Dickie Pilager as a stand-in for George W. Bush seems too coy a tactic for these scabrous times. For better or worse, we want the real--or at least, the "real"-deal.
  21. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    50
    A series of miscalculations caused this project to lose its way, until what we're left with is a film that should involve us more than it does.
  22. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    50
    Nobody in it seems organically connected to anybody else. In a movie devoted to the idea that everything and everyone is connected, this is a serious failing, and it undermines Mr. Sayles's noble intentions.
  23. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    50
    The plot of Silver City is movieish in the extreme, with filthy abandoned mines subbing for the bars and alleys of urban noir, but it's no more than mild cheese--"The Big Sleep" or "Chinatown" without the malice, rigorous design, and narrative epiphanies.
  24. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Michael Atkinson
    40
    Sayles, it seems, doesn't think much of his audience, and the tone of his discourse is only nominally less pandering than a politician's.
  25. Slate
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    40
    Takes off into the comic stratosphere in its first sequence and then slowly sinks to Earth, made logy by its noble means and Sayles' increasing inability to shoot anything but fat clots of undramatic talk in the most boring manner imaginable.
  26. Variety
    Reviewed by: David Rooney
    40
    As both political satire and noirish murder mystery, this Newmarket pickup may be too meandering and unemphatic for wide consumption.
  27. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    38
    Essentially a series of walking character sketches. The storytelling is slack and lackluster, the cliches rampant.
  28. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    38
    As it is, the movie only shudders to life when Dickie Pilager's onscreen.
  29. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Marc Mohan
    33
    Sayles has committed the cardinal sin of putting his politics ahead of his characters, and the result is predictably lame.
  30. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Jon Strickland
    30
    Fails to allow the talented ensemble time to develop "Sunshine State's" fine, Altmanesque ensemble feel, again and again missing the human and leaving cartoons that satisfy only as agitprop.
  31. Time
    Reviewed by: Richard Schickel
    30
    An uninvolving muddle.
  32. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Desson Thomson
    30
    It tries unsuccessfully to make a wry gumshoe noir out of an overarching, cross-sectional political diagram.
  33. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    30
    If Sayles had persuaded me he knew anything about Bush, his background, or his entourage that isn't already well-known, I might have felt more like laughing.
  34. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    25
    Silver City may be the mustiest political-conspiracy tale ever filmed; it's like "Chinatown" rewritten by Ralph Nader.
  35. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Robert Wilonsky
    20
    It wears out its welcome well before its halfway point, by which time you're either so tangled up in plot points you're strangling, or so bored you just wish you were being strangled.
  36. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    20
    Mr. Sayle's portrait is painfully unfunny, and the movie as a whole is a plodding polemic.
    All this critic's reviews
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