New This Week
Critics & Publications
Archives: A-Z Index
Advanced Search

Upcoming Release Calendar
Awards & Bests By Year
All-Time High Scores
All-Time Low Scores
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Film In Our Forums

sort by name

sort by score

63 11th Hour, The
47 27 Dresses
29 Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
81 Bamako
84 Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
47 Bella
68 Business of Being Born, The
69 Charlie Wilson's War
64 Cloverfield
30 Cover
68 Delirious
92 Diving Bell and the Butterfly, The
43 Final Season, The
46 Finishing the Game
41 First Sunday
66 George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead
51 Golden Compass, The
65 Great Debaters, The
63 Hannah Takes the Stairs
52 Hollywood Dreams
7 Hottie and the Nottie, The
63 How She Move
60 I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
73 I'm Not There
15 In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
81 Juno
70 Lars and the Real Girl
47 Lions for Lambs
41 Mad Money
71 Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
xx Moondance Alexander
53 Music Within
77 Nanking
48 National Treasure: Book of Secrets
44 Nina's Heavenly Delights
24 One Missed Call
74 Orphanage, The
30 Over Her Dead Body
39 P.S. I Love You
37 P2
46 Reservation Road
57 Romulus, My Father
85 Savages, The
78 Starting Out in the Evening
12 Strange Wilderness
57 Teeth
92 There Will Be Blood
38 Trailer Park Boys: The Movie
32 Untraceable
63 Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
68 War Dance
71 Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, The
43 Youth Without Youth

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

Spanish Prisoner, The
Sony Pictures Classics


6.2

based on 21 reviews
Read critic reviews
How did we calculate this?

based on 5 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie

FILM:

MPAA RATING: PG for thematic elements including tension, some violent images and brief language

Starring Campbell Scott, Steve Martin, Rebecca Pidgeon, Ben Gazzara, Ricky Jay, Felicity Huffman, Richard L. Freidman, and Jerrold Graff

This film centers on an elaborate confidence game, and its labyrinthine plot is laden with twists and reversals. (Sony Pictures Classics)

GENRE(S):	Suspense/Thriller
WRITTEN BY:	David Mamet
DIRECTED BY:	David Mamet
RELEASE DATE:	DVD: October 6, 1998 Video: April 20, 1999 Theatrical: April 3, 1998
RUNNING TIME:	110 minutes, Color
ORIGIN:	USA

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...

100

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

This is his sleekest and most engaging film thus far. If you like a good cat-and-mouse game with a keen ear for language, then go.

LA Weekly F. X. Feeney

Everyone plays their role (and the roles within their roles) to perfection, and writer-director Mamet keeps us guessing what's what and who's who right up until the final minute.

Variety Leonard Klady

The picture is a devilishly clever series of reversals that keeps you guessing to the very end.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The Spanish Prisoner resembles Alfred Hitchcock in the way that everything takes place in full view, on sunny beaches and in brightly lit rooms, with attractive people smilingly pulling the rug out from under the hero and revealing the abyss.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

A thriller so tricky that figuring it out is half the fun.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

It's a treat to encounter the deadpan light-handedness with which Mamet goes about his business.

Entertainment Weekly Ty Burr

For once, too, David Mamet the director outshines David Mamet the writer.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

Pure David Mamet is an acquired, but delicious, taste.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

Mamet's stylized dialogue, elaborate plot puzzles and the angry cleverness of his characterization makes for an invigorating, if not exactly likeable, mix.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

The Spanish Prisoner is for anyone who likes to think and feel along with the characters.

San Francisco Examiner G. Allen Johnson

The weird thing about the films David Mamet has directed is that they have about as much emotion as a cyborg in a science fiction movie, yet by the end of the picture it isn't necessary; by then the audience has supplied their own.

New York Magazine David Denby

Mamet has to learn to trust the camera more than he does; he has to stop trying to control everything with language; he has to let loose a little and just give in to the fluency, the ease, the free-flowing pleasure of making a movie.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

The Spanish Prisoner is the smoothest and most convincing of Mamet's elaborate charades and features intriguing performances by Steve Martin and Campbell Scott.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This is fun if you're looking mainly for light entertainment.

Dallas Observer Michael Sragow

Writer-director David Mamet delights in his own supposed cleverness; he wants you to scratch your head while he manipulates your brain.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

This is the fifth movie to be written and directed by David Mamet, and it's his most bizarre one yet; people speak in that dreamy, lockjawed manner we first heard in "House of Games," and their entire lives appear to be lived under the spell of some nameless paranoia.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The movie's surface of bright, brittle patter, initially off-putting, comes finally to serve as camouflage for the sinister movement of large and powerful forces.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

The story of an elaborate con game and the wholesale betrayal of an innocent man, it's also an unusually cold film that ends with a feeling of hollow soullessness.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The story works, in that everything fits together, but the film feels hollow and unfinished, like a run-through for a movie rather than the movie itself.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

The Spanish Prisoner seems an almost purely theoretical exercise, with Mamet as the con man whose sole goal is to make us believe anything he wants.

The average user rating for this movie is 6.2 (out of 10) based on 5 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Linda M. gave it a2:
I have watched this film several times, and each time think less of it. Nothing in the characters or plot seems genuine. Some of the dialog is comically phony and false. If the intent was to make some type of film parable, the subject is wrong and the plot too intricate. What is presented as some kind of intriguing "confidence game" seems to be the imaginings of an invalid who has never left his house. The amazing thing is that as bad as this movie feels on repeated viewing, much of the acting is actually quite good . . . which almost seems to highlight the problems with the script.

Shannon P. gave it a3:
Contrived. Pretentious. Sterile. Convoluted. Mamet again proves that when "one" spends "one's" lef being a writer, one doesn't have a life to write about.

L. Bacon gave it a 9:
Great soundtrack, that is apparently unreleased

Discuss this movie in our forums

Return to top of page

Spanish Prisoner, The Sony Pictures Classics

Spanish Prisoner, The
Sony Pictures Classics