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.

User Reviews

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User Score
6.7 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 137 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
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