| 100 |
Salon.com
Andrew O'Hehir
An extraordinary and original creation. It belongs alongside "Amores Perros" and "Memento" on a shortlist of 2001's most exciting revelations.
|
| 100 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Wesley Morris
A vicious horror flick with an actual beast and someone who just acts like one.
|
| 100 |
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
Carries so much impacted menace and visual narrative gamesmanship that it brought back some of the excitement I felt nearly a decade ago watching Quentin Tarantino's ''Reservoir Dogs.''
|
| 91 |
Portland Oregonian
Staff (Not credited)
It's all jolly bad fun, but the primo aspect of the exercise is the phenomenally intense performance by Kingsley as a careening sociopath who is every bit as dangerous to his friends as to his foes.
|
| 90 |
New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
A flashy, nasty triumph
|
| 90 |
Newsweek
David Ansen
A demonstration of bravura acting.
|
| 90 |
Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Though it can overreach for emotional effect and overplay its hand at times -- Sexy Beast brings considerable virtues to telling this tale, including a great eye for faces and director Glazer's palpable excitement at working in the feature medium.
|
| 90 |
Village Voice
Amy Taubin
There are long stretches in Sexy Beast that are so exhilarating it feels churlish to dwell on its flaws.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
Dana Stevens
He's (Kingsley) pure violence, a sociopath who radiates menace even while sitting perfectly still mouthing pleasantries.
|
| 90 |
New Times (L.A.)
Andy Klein
One of the compulsively watchable films this year, second only to "Memento." It's a must-see, except for those with a sensitivity to on-screen mayhem.
|
| 90 |
Slate
David Edelstein
The movie is riotously entertaining, and with a big heart, too.
|
| 90 |
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
Kingsley creates an unforgettable monster. Acting rarely gets this hypnotically explosive.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
Roger Ebert
These are hard men. They could have the "Sopranos" for dinner, throw up and have them again.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Tribune
Robert K. Elder
A noir masterpiece with Oscar-caliber performances, Sexy Beast slowly turns up the heat until we squirm.
|
| 88 |
New York Daily News
Jami Bernard
Noir has never been this bright.
|
| 88 |
Miami Herald
Curtis Morgan
It is a riveting and memorable performance and Kingsley finds subtlety in Logan where there doesn't seem to be any.
|
| 88 |
Philadelphia Inquirer
Desmond Ryan
Glazer has a daring sense of story structure that ratchets up the suspense, and his sense for sardonic black comedy is unerring.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
A Molotov cocktail of a movie, an engaging conflagration of British B-flick, cockney wit and gallows humor. There's even a delicate little love story in there.
|
| 80 |
LA Weekly
Ella Taylor
Glazer shoots with the dreamy impressionism much favored in his principal line of work, all floaty slo-mos and in-your-face close-ups punctuated by a hard-driving rock score.
|
| 80 |
Wall Street Journal
Joe Morgenstern
Appeal lies on the bright, shiny surface of its ostensibly simple plot, and in its rat-a-tat-tat language, which often sounds like Mamet-visits-Spyne.
|
| 80 |
Mr. Showbiz
Michael Atkinson
Confident, mature, deeply conceived, and convincingly inhabited, it's a surprisingly humane film -- despite the close-range shotgun spray.
|
| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
Marc Savlov
It smarts, and shocks, and just for a moment blows your mind.
|
| 75 |
Boston Globe
Jay Carr
Slightly misshapen and unbalanced, with a few loose ends, a few extraneous dream sequences. But there's something going on all the time.
|
| 75 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Sean Axmaker
Plays in spots something like a stage play smartly brought to screen.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
Lou Lumenick
A smart, funny, stylish and very violent British gangster movie.
|
| 70 |
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
The main event is the Mamet-esque battle of foul words between vintage hard-case Ray Winstone and the seething sociopath played by Ben Kingsley.
|
| 70 |
Variety
Derek Elley
Often enjoyable, massively uneven Brit ganglander with an almost surreal approach to the genre.
|
| 63 |
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
Kingsley gives the movie a jolt and blows the rest of it to pieces.
|
| 40 |
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Drove violence to the point of redundancy.
|
| 10 |
Washington Post
Stephen Hunter
In the end, I'm wondering what's so special about a film that has but one guilty pleasure and that's Ben Kingsley spraying saliva-lubricated variants of the F-word into the atmosphere like anti-aircraft fire for 10 solid minutes.
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