Michael Mann's Public Enemies, which stars Johnny Depp as John Dillinger and Christian Bale as the FBI man on his tail, has critics pretty evenly divided. Jeffrey Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere writes, "I was praising Michael Mann's gangster flick while two formidable critics—Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman and renowned essayist and filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire—were putting it down, wearing faint grins of dismissal as they said it really didn't deliver.
"'I hear you,' I said. 'You're saying it doesn't do the thing you wanted to see it do. But...you know, it's an art film!' Gleiberman's reply was somewhere between skeptical and incredulous: 'An art film?' 'Well, yeah,' I said, feeling sheepish in the face of withering disdain. But why sheepish when it's true?... And then this morning along came Manohla Dargis, the N.Y. Times critic, starting her review with the following sentence: 'Michael Mann's Public Enemies is a grave and beautiful work of art.'" In her glowing review, Dargis goes on to say, "Mr. Depp looks good as Dillinger — few contemporary actors can wear a fedora as persuasively — but the performance sneaks up on you, inching into your system scene by scene. The same holds true of Public Enemies, which looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of and very much like a Michael Mann movie, with its emphasis on men at work, its darkly moody passages, eruptions of violence and pictorial beauty."Click on the film stills above for more on this weekend's new releases and repertory screenings, which also include Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, I Hate Valentine's Day, Local Color, Nollywood Babylon, The Beaches of Agnes, The Girl from Monaco, Tony Manero, A Clockwork Orange, Newsies, The Royal Tenenbaums, Mississippi Mermaid, BAMcinématek's Afro-Punk Festival, and Willie Nelson's 4th of July Celebration.






oh how i wish i was in town this weekend to see newsies on the big screen - oh how i'm really not being sarcastic. love that movie :(
Michael Mann is really all about style, and comes up short eslewhere. Enjoy his stuff for the arty textures. And don't forget, his Hannibal Lecter was the best -way better than Sir Anthony.
Newsies!