Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

A thoroughly absorbing, even transfixing, journey to a future that may already be upon us.

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

Jim Jarmusch has come up with something strange and amazing.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

A purely cinematic experience. You've got to see it, in other words, to understand.

LA Weekly Ernest Hardy

Laced with brilliantly knotted ideas on race, masculinity and cults of violence.

Los Angeles Times Eric Harrison

It's a nearly pitch-perfect melding of genres, influences and modes of expression--it's the first Mafia movie for the hip-hop age.

Film.com Peter Brunette

What makes the film so special is that while tickling your postmodern funnybone, it never forgets to make you care for its characters, in a welcome, and almost traditional way.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

It's the kind of movie you wish you had more time to absorb and could see more than once before reviewing.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Perversely funny.

Entertainment Weekly Ty Burr

The result has the dingy grace of pigeons flying across an urban wasteland.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

This infusion of warrior philosophy is the gas in Ghost Dog's tank, and Jarmusch pumps it up for maximum octane throughout.

Time Richard Corliss

Niftily quirky.

TNT RoughCut Spencer H. Abbott

An ultra-violent cinematic rendering which will appeal to those moviegoers who like their action dramas laced with nice touches of meta-physicality and left-of-center humor.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Weirdly intriguing.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Whitaker's acting is highly creative and Jarmusch's filmmaking is as elegant and original as ever.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

So filled with amusing, idiosyncratic touches and unexpectedly charming characters that you mostly don't mind its excesses.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

It's fun, but not obvious fun.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

(Jarmusch's) most accessible film after "Night on Earth," yet it's still elliptical and enigmatic.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

It's beautifully cast and filmed (cinematography by the matchless Robby Muller) and often quite moving, despite the fact that most of the characters are never developed much beyond mythic or parodic prototypes.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Every minute he's on screen, Whitaker makes Ghost Dog worth watching.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

(Jarmusch) seems...to introduce gratuitous bloodshed that is out of sync with the engaging, offbeat tempo and dark, comedic moral fable that has come before.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Best when it's playful, toying with the fact that the Mafia has in a single generation been transmogrified from myth to joke.

USA Today Staff [Not Credited]

The movie is still too solemn.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

A movie as laconic as its hero, Ghost Dog is nonetheless diminished by its most un-Zen-like attachment to this underlying sentimentality.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

There is a lot of violence, but not much action; a plot involving vengeance, jealousy and double-crossing, but not a great deal of suspense.

Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson

Likable, but frustratingly lazy, Ghost Dog has coolness running all through it, but little substance.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Jarmusch has never seemed quite this baffling -- or quite this dull.

Slate David Edelstein

Am I the only one who finds the substance of this movie repulsive?

TV Guide Ken Fox

Points for an interesting concept; demerits for the dull execution.

Variety Todd McCarthy

The gambits in Ghost Dog seem simply like literary and cinematic games devoid of any larger meaning.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

It's too cryptic and unfulfilled to serve as a tool for anything beyond its own obfuscation.