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The Good Shepherd
Metascore
61 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 33 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 18 out of 33
  2. Mixed: 15 out of 33
  3. Negative: 0 out of 33
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  1. San Francisco Examiner
    Reviewed by: Walter Addiego
    100
    A remarkable study of the corrosive effects of fear and power on an establishment insider who puts duty above all else.
  2. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: David Denby
    100
    One of the most impressive movies ever made about espionage.
  3. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    91
    It's the type of film that may be forgiven its imperfections when they are compared with the vastness of its accomplishments.
  4. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    88
    De Niro pulls the viewer into the world he has created and holds him there, sometimes spellbound, until the story is over and the end credits roll.
  5. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    80
    While a bit unwieldy at nearly three hours and at times slow going, the film is absolutely fascinating for anyone who shares De Niro's passions.
  6. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    80
    It's taken a dozen years for Eric Roth's smart, thoughtful, psychologically complicated script to reach the screen under Robert De Niro's careful and methodical direction, and it is easy to see why.
  7. Time
    Reviewed by: Richard Corliss/Richard Schickel
    80
    Damon is terrific in the role--all-knowing, never overtly expressing a feeling. Indeed, so is everyone else in this intricate, understated but ultimately devastating account of how secrets, when they are left to fester, can become an illness, dangerous to those who keep them, more so to nations that base their policies on them.
  8. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    80
    The Good Shepherd is serious adult moviemaking, a truly surprising effort from De Niro, a man deeply interested in the art, craft and psychology of espionage. He seems to believe that we'd better be interested in it, because it's interested in us.
  9. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    75
    A cool-headed thriller, and a richly detailed character study that traces the birth and evolution of America's foreign espionage bureaucracy, The Good Shepherd also marks a significantly more mature, assured directing turn from Robert De Niro.
  10. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    75
    Roth's screenplay, steeped in the peculiar rituals, lock-jawed repression and smug sense of superiority of the WASP ruling class that both shaped America's intelligence community and made it vulnerable, is less interested in derring-do than back-room deals and the day-to-day drudgery of spying, driven by the notion that espionage is a cynical high-stakes game played with people's lives and the ante is human decency and connectedness.
  11. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Claudia Puig
    75
    Deliberately paced, epic and ambitious, The Good Shepherd feels related in tone, mood and style to "The Godfather."
  12. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Scott Brown
    75
    Here, he's (Damon) the ultimate enigma machine, a man willing to erase himself for his country. Does that make him a hero? The Good Shepherd is too closemouthed to let on.
  13. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    75
    The problem with The Good Shepherd is that it's a closed-off movie about a closed-off individual. Wilson is inscrutable from the get-go, and remains so. Damon does subtle work within the narrowest of confines.
  14. Newsweek
    Reviewed by: David Ansen
    70
    Still, even if the movie's vast reach exceeds its grasp, it's a spellbinding history lesson. The Good Shepherd demands you watch it like a spy: alert, paranoid, never knowing whom you can trust, or who will stab you in the back.
  15. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    63
    Shepherd wants to say something profound about the effect of a deceitful government on human values. But it's tough to slog through a movie that has no pulse.
  16. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
    63
    It's fitting that a drama trading in classified information would turn out to be such a cryptic bugger.
  17. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Elizabeth Weitzman
    63
    Even with its first-rate cast, current political relevance and tangled mysteries, The Good Shepherd remains as remote as Wilson himself. But frankly, if the lives of CIA spies are really this dreary, they may as well keep their secrets to themselves.
  18. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    63
    Leaves you longing for the other, better political thrillers it evokes.
  19. Empire
    Reviewed by: Kim Newman
    60
    Well-crafted and well-acted, but ever-so-slightly worthy and strangely unaffecting. Given the track record of the CIA, it probably ought to be angrier.
  20. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    60
    The most interesting thing about The Good Shepherd is how hard the filmmakers work not only to demystify the agency, but also to strip it of its allure, its heat.
  21. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: William Arnold
    58
    In some ways, De Niro does a competent job in his second directorial effort but his characterizations are clumsy, and his members of the Power Elite always seem less real people than stick figures in a propaganda movie.
  22. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Michael Sragow
    58
    If only De Niro or screenwriter Eric Roth had the instinct to play some of this for laughs or even outrageous burlesque. Despite their conviction and intelligence and their game, amazing cast, all they do is eke out a series of straight-faced dramatic reversals and personal betrayals that leave the dramatis personae, and the audience, numb.
  23. Miami Herald
    Reviewed by: Rene Rodriguez
    50
    The Good Shepherd, for all its noble intentions, manages to make even espionage boring.
  24. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Lou Lumenick
    50
    A glacially paced, emotionally frosty epic (with a top-drawer cast).
  25. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    50
    Where's 007 when you need him? Neither shaken nor stirred, The Good Shepherd is a flat draft of history that looks at the Central Intelligence Agency's early years through the horn-rimmed gaze of a fictional spook.
  26. Charlotte Observer
    Reviewed by: Lawrence Toppman
    50
    If serious intent led inevitably to greatness, The Good Shepherd would be a masterpiece. It turtles forward for 160 minutes with unrelenting, humorless solemnity, as if everyone involved were unaware that it has arrived three decades too late to matter.
  27. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    50
    Despite successfully creating the illusion of forbidden glimpses, The Good Shepherd slogs through most of its lengthy running time.
  28. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Stephanie Zacharek
    50
    The Good Shepherd, soft when it needs to be sharp, is all cloak with very little dagger.
  29. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Robert Wilonsky
    50
    The Good Shepherd needed to be either considerably longer -- more like 1979's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" miniseries -- or considerably shorter (word has it De Niro cut 30 minutes). Right now, it's stuck in the deadly dull middle in which everything happens but nothing matters since the filmmakers can't stick with one event or idea long enough for it to, well, stick.
  30. Variety
    Reviewed by: Staff (Not credited)
    50
    Robert De Niro's second film as a director adopts a methodical approach and deliberate pace in attempting to grasp an almost forbiddingly intricate subject, with a result that is not boring, exactly, but undeniably tedious.
  31. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Andrea Gronvall
    50
    Perhaps it's fitting that a movie about the early CIA be tangled and opaque, but this drama loosely based on the life of uberspook James Angleton verges on incoherence.
  32. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Keith Phipps
    50
    De Niro made the right choice in making this a film of cold, gray Leiters rather than dynamic Bonds. But he never makes us feel the chill.
  33. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    40
    De Niro is damned if he's going to make a standard thriller out of this view from within the CIA, which might be refreshing if his solemn moral parable weren't so lacking in any other kind of juice, and if its hero were less of a round-shouldered, whey-faced organization man.
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User Reviews

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User Score
6.7 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 132 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 52 out of 83
  2. Mixed: 12 out of 83
  3. Negative: 19 out of 83
  1. mytwocents
    6
    The Good Shepherd might have made an interesting love story -- Damon's character's love for a deaf girl, from a presumably humdrum background, interrupted by the pushy, establishment Jolie character. But while the deaf girl wasn't thrown out of a plane (as another, and the only non-white character in the film, will be) she might as well have been. Instead we get -- history. But it's not really history: more like Oliver Stone on downers. We get laughably stock KGB operatives, CIA self-aggrandizement ("CIA", not "the CIA"), wily Krauts and dutiful WASPs. Who, in one of the better throwaway lines of the film, own the United States of America, in case there was in any confusion on that point in the era of Barack Obama. It's a cliche, but I think a necessary one, that there is hardly a sympathetic character -- hardly a character -- in the film. The actual history of the CIA is fraught with failures thinking themselves noble, though, so perhaps this is an accurate depiction of its work after all. As a work of fiction it succeeds mostly in hinting at what it could have been.… Full Review »
  2. Alexander_Fred
    10
    The Good Shepherd is very much a difficult film to understand. At first glance, it is over 2 and a half hours of boring, sluggish history tracing the early history of counterintelligence within the CIA. But upon second glance, the film emerges as something quite different. Is it at all entertaining? No. Is it at all thrilling? For brief moments. But all in all, the film is not meant to be entertaining or thrilling. It is meant to be what film once thrived to be: pure art. It becomes difficult when first seeing this film to see the artistic majesty because most of us have become accustomed to watching a monkey throw **** on a wall and then calling that art. The Good Shepherd becomes like the Mona Lisa, but we must first remember that the Mona Lisa is art and **** on a wall is just **** on a wall. Then we see that this film is perfect because it is art, a true artistic piece of cinema.… Full Review »
  3. KlunkoJ
    4
    The Good Shepherd certainly isn’t all bad. A lot of things ultimately attributable to director Robert DeNiro are positives: The pacing ably conveys the plodding tedium of working for a government bureaucracy, combined with the sporadic tension of crises, both professional and personal, while the muted audio serves as a relatively subtle counterpoint to the repetitive (and thereby somewhat more heavy-handed) inclusion of deaf or hard-of-hearing characters, adding up to a sense of being excluded from critical information – which must be a permanent condition for those really playing the intelligence game. The photography, the set scouting, the prop selection – everything that resulted in this movie’s visual look and feel – are all outstanding in concept and execution. The problem with The Good Shepherd – and unfortunately, it’s a killer – is that this film purports to be a fictionalized version of the origins and early Cold War history of the Central Intelligence Agency. The subject is inherently political. Everyone has his or her politics, and that’s fine. It’s not fine when fact is mangled in the service of one political agenda or another. I strongly suspect that with The Good Shepherd, “fictionalization” has been cited as an excuse for trashing facts that conflicted with someone’s political agenda, and inserting new pseudo-facts that are a lot more manageable. Shepherd screenwriter Eric Roth reportedly enjoyed, and based the film in part on, Norman Mailer’s novel, Harlot’s Ghost. It shows. Roth would’ve been better served simply adapting Mailer’s work for film, because, while Mailer’s work takes liberties with historical fact, it isn’t nearly so self-indulgent, or so inclined to the political hard sell, as Shepherd ended up being. From the beginning, The Good Shepherd oversells the well-trodden notion that the CIA was dominated in its early days by Ivy Leaguers, particularly Yalies from the secretive Skull and Bones society. While this notion is factually and historically accurate, Roth dismisses anything that detracts from it. One particularly salient counter-example to the Ivy Leaguers’ sway in the CIA was Bill Harvey. Harvey was one of the most outstanding officers of the early CIA. He was bigger than life: fat, foul-mouthed, alcoholic, reckless with guns, racist, religiously bigoted, and sexist (oddly enough, except with his wife, whom he by all accounts loved). Harvey was a state university graduate from Indiana – almost the antithesis of the Ivy Leaguers offered up in Roth’s script (except for the fact that he was neither black, nor Jewish, nor Catholic). Harvey was also an ex-FBI agent, drummed out of the Bureau by J. Edgar Hoover, who went to work for the upstart new CIA at least partly to spite his old boss. Harvey went on to run CIA’s Berlin Station famously well during a critical period of the early Cold War. Despite his many flaws – or perhaps, because of a perfect, interlocking balance of several of them – Harvey was largely responsible for an operation that still stands today as one of CIA’s major successes: The Berlin Tunnel. With this operation, Harvey and his people managed to tunnel from Berlin’s western sector into the Soviet-occupied eastern sector, stocking the tunnel with electronic eavesdropping equipment that ultimately collected thousands of hours of what the Soviets thought were secret Red Army communications. Harvey’s control of the operation kept security maintained despite the multitude of problems, chief of which was probably where and how to dispose of all the dirt moved during the tunneling phase without the Soviets figuring it all out. Bill Harvey was also one of the only Americans to suspect the British traitor Harold Adrian Russell “Kim” Philby – represented almost kindly in The Good Shepherd as “Archie Cummings” – early on. Why doesn’t The Good Shepherd include at least some reference to a key figure such as Harvey? Well, it’s a long, sometimes-plodding movie as it is. I can’t imagine the studio wanting it longer. But I suspect the omission of Harvey also has something to do both with maintaining Roth’s conception of the CIA as an exclusive bastion of Skull and Bones, and with the peddling of a Left political agenda. Someone as obnoxiously Right – and successful – as Harvey is simply inconvenient in that regard. There are other examples of inconvenient facts being mangled or omitted in The Good Shepherd. William Hurt’s character, Philip Allen – almost undoubtedly meant as a representation of CIA Director Allen Dulles – states at one point that there will be “no Jews” in the ground-floor CIA. This statement is demonstrably false – and surprising, given Roth’s reported attention to Harlot’s Ghost, which features one Jew and one New Englander of half-Jewish descent, both CIA officers, among its four major characters. Again, this appears to be an example of Roth trying too hard to push his notion of Skull an Bones exclusivity, malevolently manifest in a CIA that was at least naughty, if not outright evil, from the beginning. Sometimes Roth’s molestation of historical fact runs to politically-driven anachronism. The Good Shepherd superficially treats the cases of Soviet defectors Anatoliy Golitsyn and Yuriy Nosenko. In the real world, Soviet intelligence officer Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the CIA, and, rather intriguingly, put about the notion that the Soviets would deliberately dispatch other, false defectors, with the purpose of discrediting the ostensibly genuine information Golitsyn was providing. Sure enough, Nosenko came along a few years later, another Soviet defector, who definitely did try to discredit Golitsyn. A very “hall of mirrors” scenario – which one to believe? One problem with The Good Shepherd’s treatment of this plotline is that it could comprise a film all on its own. It’s too complicated to be dealt with effectively as subplot. Another problem is that the CIA’s documented harsh interrogation of Nosenko is commingled with the CIA’s research and development into LSD. It’s known that the CIA was hoping to use LSD as a sort of “truth serum”, or possibly as a means of “programming” otherwise-unwitting and/or –unwilling operatives. However, there was no documented use of LSD on Nosenko, who ultimately survived the CIA’s harsh interrogation and went on to live out his life in freedom, somewhere in northern Virginia. The second defector in The Good Shepherd, on the other hand, falls to an LSD-provoked death – but only after spouting a bunch of nonsense about the Soviet Union being a pseudo-superpower, rotting from the inside out, which the United States (chiefly the CIA) has conflated into a goliath in order to sustain its military-industrial complex. If such a line had come from a Soviet defector circa 1979, it might be believable. But in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Soviets were leading us in the space race. They were checkmating us in the Third World. They were beginning to bleed us in places like Vietnam, and their Arab clients had every chance of annihilating the State of Israel. There was no reason for any Soviet, even a defector, to peddle such a line of patent tripe. The inclusion of waterboarding in the regimen of harsh measures to which the second Soviet defector is exposed in The Good Shepherd is but a more blatant example of the same kind of politically-motivated anachronism, excused by the increasingly flimsy cover that this film is a “fictionalization”. Finally, the actors. Based on all of the above, one might expect a ringing condemnation of generally Left performers like Matt Damon and Alec Baldwin, but I think they actually turned in great efforts. Matt Damon, in particular, conveyed perfectly the sense that allowing oneself emotion is an indulgence, one that’s not affordable within the context of a high-stakes global conflict spanning decades. Alec Baldwin, of course, is immensely talented, with an apparently limitless range, whatever his politics. And anyway, it wasn’t Matt Damon or Alec Baldwin who wrote this thing. Angelina Jolie, however, is simply annoying in The Good Shepherd, as is generally the case with most aspects of her public image. It’s a tribute to the acting skills of Matt Damon, and the directorial skills of Robert DeNiro, that a movie built on such a rickety foundation of non-fact can still be as watchable and as entertaining as The Good Shepherd is. However, given DeNiro’s reported interest in intelligence, and his stated plans to crank out sequels to Shepherd, I would hope that next time out, he taps someone else for the script.… Full Review »
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