|
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
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Spanish Prisoner, The
Sony Pictures Classics
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.
90
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.
90
Variety
Leonard Klady
The picture is a devilishly clever series of reversals that keeps you guessing to the very end.
88
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.
88
Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
A thriller so tricky that figuring it out is half the fun.
88
Boston Globe
Jay Carr
It's a treat to encounter the deadpan light-handedness with which Mamet goes about his business.
83
Entertainment Weekly
Ty Burr
For once, too, David Mamet the director outshines David Mamet the writer.
80
Washington Post
Michael O'Sullivan
Pure David Mamet is an acquired, but delicious, taste.
75
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.
75
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
The Spanish Prisoner is for anyone who likes to think and feel along with the characters.
75
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.
70
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.
70
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.
70
Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
This is fun if you're looking mainly for light entertainment.
60
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.
60
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.
60
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.
50
Salon.com
Charles Taylor
The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.
50
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.
50
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.
50
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 6.7 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Discuss this movie in our forums |
|
