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100This is the kind of movie that literate viewers pine for, laced with gracefulness and wit.
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This genteel period piece invites a typically Mametian tension between its characters' stylized manners and their underlying motivations.
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90If The Winslow Boy has a flaw, it's that Mamet's style is impeccable to a fault, too cool and remote to have much of an emotional payoff. But since few directors can even approach his level of precision, that's a very minor complaint.
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90This engaging film proves a total pleasure, suitable for moviegoers who like their films a bit old-fashioned but still mainstream.
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90The result is a film of rare restraint and surprising power.
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90Mamet's graceful, reverent movie adaptation moves along with a deliberating, almost hypnotic flow, strengthened by impeccable, dignified performances from Nigel Hawthorne, Rebecca Pidgeon and others.
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90He doesn't lose his stylistic identity either: in addition to the very Mamet-like delivery of unfinished sentences, his command of rhythm and flow remains flawless throughout.
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88Sixty seconds of wondering if someone is about to kiss you is more entertaining than 60 minutes of kissing. By understanding that, Mamet is able to deliver a G-rated film that is largely about adult sexuality.
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88Hell has not yet frozen over, but here's something equally unexpected: David Mamet has made a G-rated movie for adults.
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88The result is a rare treat, a revival of a period piece that doesn't descend into mere quaintness or prettiness, and that manages to capture the spirit of an earlier time without sacrificing the perspective of our own.
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80What's left is "Masterpiece Theatre," a very clean, straightforward adaptation of a beautifully constructed play, faithful to a dead man's classical virtues -- harmony, proportion, balance -- if not to the director's own, more iconoclastic ones.
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80Genteel moviemaking with modern overtones, The Winslow Boy is especially good at the visual re-creation of its time.
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80Mamet's handsome, stately adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy does not embellish upon its source material. Instead it skillfully pares the play down to its essentials, arriving at a faithful but tighter version of this drama.
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80Beat by beat, Mamet turns out an immaculately staged, crisply paced, and elegantly acted movie. It's also a tad bloodless, but you can't have everything.
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80Mamet's real triumph, however, is in his directing. Like every good director, he has "seen" the picture before he made it; and he saw it as a piece with the intimacy and physicality of a play that nonetheless flowed like cinema.
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78Mamet's dialogue is still on the mark, rapid-fire, and as cutting as an antique straight razor.
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75A pleasure to watch and also serves as a reminder of a time when "right over might" was at the core of a powerful country's credo. [28 May 1999, Tempo, p.5]
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75A study in unexpressed emotion, but Mamet turns the flame so low that his film lacks the emotional payoff we expect.
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75At once a stifling exercise in thwarting emotional dynamics and a heated invitation to engage in the film's discourse on the shortcoming of sexual politics and justice in a media-saturated land.
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75In the movie's high point, (Jeremy) Northam conducts an antagonistic interview with the boy, who eludes well-placed lawyerly traps.
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75Mamet illustrates that he can work as capably from someone else's script as he can from his own, and that his talent as a director is not eclipsed by his ability as a writer.
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70Mamet doesn't take the material as far as it can go -- we're left with a pleasing fable about the battle of the sexes and the virtues of persistence in a just cause. The neatness of it all is both appealing and appalling, and perhaps this combo is what finally hooked Mamet.
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70This film is solidly built, faithful to its material, and utterly lacking in pretense, but its maker is still running in place.
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70Very English, very period and very polite.
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70The case is tried off-screen. Thank goodness for the maid (Sarah Flind), who runs home from her chores with tidings from the outside world -- we hear from the maid that Sir Bobby gave a helluva final argument. The jurors wept, the crowd went wild. Too bad we missed it.
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70David Mamet has adapted and directed Terence Rattigan's 1946 play, which was based on a true story, with a fidelity so profound that one doesn't know whether to be amazed or depressed by it.
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60Mamet loves to cast his current wives in lead roles -- Whatever you may feel about Mamet's writing, he has an uncanny knack for marrying mediocre actresses.
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50Handsomely appointed and faultlessly acted, but no more alive than a well-dressed corpse.
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