Weekend Movie Forecast: Public Enemies Vs. Ice Age

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."