- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
100No matter where your political leanings lie, the great thing about The Conspirator is that Mr. Redford is wise enough to let the audience decide what the parallels are. See it, enjoy a ripping good yarn and learn something.
-
91Redford proves that at 75 he can still choose meaningful projects and deliver them with intelligence.
-
80The cast is uniformly outstanding, a pleasure to watch. It's a more toned-down role for the often-fiery McAvoy, and it suits him.
-
75Redford methodically presents the injustices piled on Surratt and suggests what might have prompted her stoicism. But James D. Solomon's script is often flat, perhaps in a misguided effort to be stately.
-
75Redford considers this material in an unusually literate and thoughtful historical film, working from years of research by his screenwriter, James Solomon. I found it absorbing and relevant today.
-
75Redford's history lesson illustrates the old maxim that those who forget history are bound to repeat it.
-
75The film pivots on McAvoy's powerfully implosive performance as a man trying to grow beyond his own prejudices. His scenes with Wright, under Redford's nuanced guidance, give this film its timely resonance and its grieving heart.
-
75It's precisely that fear that Redford sets out to explore. The Conspirator is all about the un-American things Americans can do when feeling collectively threatened.
-
75This provocative account of a war-weary administration that denied Surratt her right to a fair trial starts slow but builds momentum in the scenes with Wright and Evan Rachel Wood as Surratt's flinty daughter, Anna.
-
75May not be as emotionally compelling as John Ford's work ("The Prisoner of Shark Island"), but it's every bit as meticulously crafted.
-
70This handsome period piece should develop a strong afterlife on DVD and in schools.
-
70The resolution and strength of Wright's unimpeachable performance makes the whole story seem flesh-and-blood real in a way that it would not otherwise be.
-
70The real standout is Kevin Kline as secretary of war Edwin Stanton.
-
70Wright's performance is the key to a movie that pulses with the sick thrill of historical discovery. The Conspirator reminds us that. when we surrendered so many of our Constitutional rights and judgments after 9/11, it wasn't the first time.
-
67Essentially The Conspirator is a courtroom drama with occasional bulletins from the outside world. It plays out to its predictable end with the doggedness, if not the verve, of a "Law and Order" episode.
-
65The bad news is that The Conspirator - doesn't have enough crackle.
-
63In The Conspirator, Wright announces in no uncertain terms that she is back and more than ready for her close-up.
-
60Historical records being what they are, the filmmakers are forced to speculate about certain things, but where facts are known they generally adhere to them.
-
60Like his 2007 political drama, "Lions for Lambs," Robert Redford's fictionalized chronicle of Mary Surratt's 1865 trial is high-minded and slow-moving. Some may chafe at his unsubtle sermonizing, but strong central performances will reward the patient.
-
60There's no Deep Throat this time, but Tom Wilkinson does his best Ben Bradlee as a hawkish legal mentor, while Kevin Kline coos menacingly as Lincoln's Nixonian war secretary, Edwin Stanton, a man seeking to hang prisoners out of political expediency. It all seems a little forced.
-
60The screenwriter, James Solomon, does the poor job only a liberal could at making the case for a Cheneyesque "dark side," and he isn't helped by Kline's wooden acting. Too bad. The Conspirator is eloquent enough to let the other side have its say.
-
58While Redford frames the drama with a tense atmosphere, it doesn't shake the sense that we're watching a tame made-for-TV affair.
-
50Redford hasn't moved too far here from an earlier political-thriller template: With its skulduggery, late-night meetings and the contemptuous political cabal out to thwart justice, The Conspirator can be thought of as "All the President's Men – The Lincoln Edition."
-
50This methodical courtroom drama is charged with impassioned performances and an unimpeachable liberal message. But its stodgy emphasis on telling over showing will limit its reach to Civil War buffs and self-selecting older viewers.
-
50Less a movie than an extended re-enactment from a History Channel documentary, the movie is stagey, preachy, and long on exposition.
-
50The movie is stiff-jointed and dull.
-
50Instead of entertaining us, director Robert Redford offers us a handsome history lesson that's as dry as a hardtack biscuit.
-
50An important film, on an important subject, that has had the life beaten out of it by Robert Redford, a man who should know better.
-
50The film has little flash of life and energy.
-
50Heartbreakingly average, director Robert Redford's The Conspirator errs in the way so many films do, especially films about unsung pieces of American history. It focuses on the wrong character.
-
50In The Conspirator, one wishes that the director had found the grace to touch upon, rather than belabor, the parallels between the conspirators of 1865 and the present-day inmates of Guantánamo.
-
42The film is as one-sided and overstacked as anything her prosecutors dreamed up. And the craft of the thing is so pedestrian as to crawl.
-
42The Conspirator should skip theaters altogether and become the first film released straight to middle-school history classes, where the standards for what can generously be deemed entertainment are much lower.
-
40The few glimpses we catch of the Ford's Theater production of "Our American Cousin" are unfortunately the liveliest and most convincing moments in this well-meaning, misbegotten movie.
-
30The film is a burdensome two hours.
-
25The Conspirator hits a new nadir for Redford: Sitting through this stage-bound, talky, stiffly-acted movie reminded me of having to endure the Hall of Presidents attraction at Walt Disney World (one of the few existing bits of proof that Disney had a dark and evil side).
-
20Like most other members of an excellent cast that includes James McAvoy, Kevin Kline and Tom Wilkinson, she (Robin Wright) has come under the deadening directorial hand of Robert Redford.