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91Branagh, chewing on a plummy Georgia accent, makes the divorced, boozing, and womanizing Magruder a smug yet touchingly vulnerable legal player.
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80With unexpected success, Robert Altman plays a John Grisham mystery in a seductive new key.
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80A fascinatingly strange and chaotic ballet set to familiar noir motifs.
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78The most stylish and original John Grisham story on film.
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75It's all atmospheric, quirky and entertaining: the kind of neo-noir in which old-fashioned characters have updated problems.
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75There's great pleasure in watching a movie in which the director has thought out everything beforehand.
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75The result is an entertaining and sporadically engrossing two hours.
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70Best of all, Robert Downey Jr., as Rick's seedy private eye provides a little comic relief at his own expense.
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70Branagh is appealing here in the way we remember from movie heroes of the '30s: cynical, wisecracking and wised-up.
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70One of those movies that's great fun to watch, even if it decomposes more totally in your mind with each step out of the auditorium.
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70The trouble is that the picture is far from over when suddenly we find ourselves watching another movie -- a punishing, overly complex melodrama in which the Gingerbread Man receives his comeuppance.
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The acting is also solid, starting with Branagh's believable Georgia accent.
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63And, in a pointless riffing on the title, there are ginger kitties galore -- this flick has enough cats to launch a Broadway musical.
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60There is a trumped-up quality to the action climaxes that is disappointingly perfunctory, and the story's final revelation is simultaneously far-fetched and unsurprising.
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50Between Magruder's oily schmoozing and the camera-ready combo of Spanish moss and constant rain, he and cinematographer Changwei Gu whip up some amazing atmosphere.
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All accusatory fingers should be pointed at director Robert Altman, who further drains his reputation surplus with this unoriginal and uninteresting piece of exploitation.
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50The lesson of this barely stylish crime thriller is that a dull story is not improved by withholding information about characters' motives from the audience as long as possible.
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40Built on one of those particularly ludicrous plots in which, just before the end, we are meant to believe that a long succession of coincidences was really a diabolical scheme. [23 Feb 1998, p. 24]
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