Popular reviews

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★ 1

  "Pretty boy Floyd, you're under arrest."
  "It's Charles... Charles Floyd."

  Mann is one of the few filmmakers that understands how inherently dehumanizing institutions are (Blackhat his most thrillingly literal translation of the idea); here we see American history, often experienced from a distance, made into a deeply intimate, human portrait of obsolescence—the immediacy of the 'cops and robbers' foreground (gunfire has never been as palpable) a distraction from the real crimes, the real war happening just outside the frame. The mythic, romanticized feud between American icons Dillinger and Pervis is rendered here as a brutal tragedy, both are too single-minded in their missions to see that they're cogs in the rise of cruel American systems (surveillance, banks, telecommunications, the FBI,…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½ 3

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Follows Dillinger repeatedly from right behind, that trademark Mann shoulder close-up. Right up until after he's seen himself (or at least the idea of himself, a representation) in a movie. He's the myth now, history not the future. The last time that follow shot happens is a snap before a bullet blows through his cheek, and suddenly he stops short, turns around, and sees it coming.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 8

  I saw recently on here a write-up noting that this film quite literally sits between Miami Vice's stylistic motivations and Blackhat's political ones - I think that's true, but on a bigger, more extreme scale than either film ever reaches. Public Enemies is an enormous film and in my opinion arguably Mann's richest, constantly shifting & intertwining thematic outliers and formal conceits - it's yet another film about Baudrilliardian prison simulacra, but also a film on the birth of modern surveillance & the FBI, the birth of modern celebrity, a character study of Dillinger himself, the end of a certain romanticism & how all these points shaped the America which we know today. This does make the film seem bloated on occasion -…

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★½ 5

  In 2006, Mann by pure happenstance aligned with David Lynch and Pedro Costa in providing a canvas for experimenting with the limits of burgeoning digital video technology. In 2009, you could argue that he made an equally inadvertent pairing with James Cameron in testing the new format on an epic scale. But if Avatar is a massive tech demo, Public Enemies is an attempt to see how the grammar of film itself might be manipulated to shake up even the oldest genres in cinema history.

  I can't think of another film that resembles this, a gangster epic that feels claustrophobic. The camera, typically handheld, always gives the impression of being shoved aside by gangsters and feds, both equally dead-eyed and…

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  Review by I.V. ★★★★½

  "On October 23rd, you robbed a bank in Greencastle, Indiana. You got away with $74,802. You thought that was a big score? These phones make that every day. And it keeps getting made—day after day after day, a river of money, and it gets deeper and wider, week in and week out, month in and month out, flowing right to us."

  Next scene:
  "Create informants, Agent Purvis. The suspects are to be interrogated vigorously, grilled. No obsolete notions of sentimentality. We are in the modern age. We are making history. Take direct, expedient action. As they say in Italy these days, 'Take off the white gloves!'"

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  Review by DirkH ★★ 25

  Michael Mann has succeeded in something very few directors managed to do. Make Johnny Depp boring.

  A film about such a rich period of American history should be filled to the brim with excitement, littered with larger than life characters and transport us to an era gone by.

  In the latter it succeeds, in the rest it fails miserably. I appreciate the attention to detail in the production design, everything looks stunning. No problems there.

  Where it falters is in its plot and the characters that inhabit it. Everything is so pedantic and shallow, which is in fact the exact opposite of its source material. Dillinger is an iconic character, one I was eager to get acquainted with, but here…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 6

  one of the most insane looking films ever funded and released by a major american studio -- ghostly after-images of a vanishing way of life, mann's digital camera illuminates the last light in a dying person's eyes, the future and past colliding in the most fleeting glance; more than money, this is a story about stealing time.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½ 3

  failure to adapt. Dillinger fights his obsolescence while the movie around him has evolved. analog gives way to digital.

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★ 2

  dillinger was the hero and the fbi can suck it

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 12

  the climax with dillinger in the theater is an extraordinary evocation. in that moment, he's able to fully embody himself as an icon within the consciousness of humanity, his identification with clark gable's fictional romantic gangster gives him the final justice and power over the burgeoning fascists of the FBI and the american penal system. these men can jail him, kill all his friends, kill dillinger himself, but they cannot destroy who he is, his true self, his status as a mythical figure within the public sphere. not dillinger as the mortal man who bleeds and perishes, but dillinger as the eternal individual against a relentless totalizing system, an iconoclastic legend that refused to exist on the terms of those…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½ 6

  Action!: MANN MEN - In the Heat of Digital Mike's Manhunt

  I haven't seen this movie since I went to see it with my mum when it was initially released. And all I could think about was how ugly the film looked with its high frames. Thankfully, the HBOMAX version looked better. You still got some of that digital cinematography that feels like the bitrate is pretty high, and while it is effectively employed at some scenes, such as the chase scenes, robbery scenes, and the ending, it was distracting at others. Overall, Mann's direction is excellent, and I particularly enjoyed how he employed modern songs to give the film a cool vibe.

  Johnny Depp excels in his role, playing…

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  Review by Michael Mann Facts ★★★★★ 1

  Miami Vice, Public Enemies, Blackhat… a trilogy of digital masterpieces about law, order, and the ruthless speed at which systems of power progress.

  If Crockett and Tubbs were in over their heads, this is the film that, despite its 1930s setting, breaks it all open, setting the ground for the surveillance state fully realized in the technology of Hathaway’s world. 

  More than any other, one line connects the three, Viola Davis’s Carol Barrett asking: 

  “Who did you lose?”

  People losing their privacy, their agency, but most devastatingly and blatantly, each other. Isabella and Sonny, John Dillinger and Billie Frechette… at Blackhat’s conclusion Hathaway and Chen Lien are inseparable, finally able to dodge the omniscience of modern law—a system that Melvin Purvis…