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Year One
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Spanish Prisoner, The
EMAILPRINTSony Pictures Classics

Generally favorable reviews
Based on 21 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 8 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Suspense/Thriller
Written by: David Mamet
Directed by: David Mamet
Release Date:
Theatrical: April 3, 1998
DVD: October 6, 1998
Running Time: 110 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
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)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Heist Redbelt Spartan State and Main Winslow Boy, The
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
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...
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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Variety Leonard Klady
The picture is a devilishly clever series of reversals that keeps you guessing to the very end.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
A thriller so tricky that figuring it out is half the fun.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Jay Carr
It's a treat to encounter the deadpan light-handedness with which Mamet goes about his business.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Ty Burr
For once, too, David Mamet the director outshines David Mamet the writer.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan
Pure David Mamet is an acquired, but delicious, taste.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The Spanish Prisoner is for anyone who likes to think and feel along with the characters.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is fun if you're looking mainly for light entertainment.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Charles Taylor
The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >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.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.7 (out of 10) based on 8 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
