Catch Me If You Can Reviews
Top CriticThis is the director's most likeable film in ages, even if it's insubstantial, overlong and, frankly, a touch redundant.
DiCaprio has the breeze and aplomb to keep it all bouncing along.
A delicious cat-and-mouse game flecked with intriguing Oedipal undertones.
A gently funny, sweetly adventurous film that makes you feel genuinely good, that is to say, entirely unconned by false sentiment or sharp, overmanipulative Hollywood practices.
Catch Me if You Can is one of those deceptively slight offerings that manages to reveal more about its maker than the intended masterpieces often do.
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| Original Score: 3/4
What begins brightly gets bogged down over 140 minutes.
| Original Score: 2/4
Spielberg perfectly re-creates the fashions, the mood and the trends of the '60s, and DiCaprio and Hanks have a lot of fun with their roles.
After a series of dud roles, DiCaprio is back in star form.
One of the most enjoyable films of the year.
It's more amusing than hilarious, more cute than inspired, but there's just too much talent on and off the screen for it to fail.
| Original Score: 4/5
Offers mild fun but never as much as its animated '60s-retro opening credits portend.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
[Spielberg's] frothiest and most fun movie in years.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Ultimately about fathers and sons -- but it's also about the pleasures of telling a good story, with retro charm to spare.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The colorful cinematography, smart performances and brisk tempo suggest a filmmaker subordinating every other impulse to the task of manufacturing pleasure.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's fun for a while, a lot of fun, but it should have ended while it was ahead.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Fleet-footed and fun, if a mite too long.
| Original Score: 3/4
Spielberg knows that he has a great yarn here, and he's not about to let anything -- not even his own virtuoso style, which can elsewhere be effectively glitzy -- get in the way.
| Original Score: 4/5
A very adult, very funny, very well-acted daydream that should delight just about anyone who's ever been asked for picture ID.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
This breezy caper movie becomes a soulful, incisive meditation on the way we were, and the way we are.
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| Original Score: 4/4
DiCaprio gives a radiant, movie-star performance.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The story is a good story, directly told, and such meaning as it has comes from the irony that the only person who completely appreciates Abagnale's accomplishments is the man trying to arrest him.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The most charming of Mr. Spielberg's mature films, because is it so relaxed.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Precisely what a mainstream movie should be: fleet, savvy and, like a good con, executed as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
| Original Score: A-
Sporting a stingy-brimmed hat and erratic Boston accent, Hanks gives a ludicrous performance.
You won't find a movie that's more fun this season -- but at 2-1/2 hours, it's probably too much of a good thing.
| Original Score: 3/4
The movie feels like the work of a filmmaker who has earned himself a break. Because it's Spielberg, the audience gets to share in the party.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
For all his genre-hopping and shape-shifting Spielberg seems to have become too big to tell small stories, which is one reason why the film sputters on one too many false endings.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Affirms the gifts of all involved, starting with Spielberg and going right through the ranks of the players -- on-camera and off -- that he brings together.
| Original Score: 3/4
Mindful in many ways of Spielberg's very first feature, the good-natured fugitives-on-the run drama The Sugarland Express.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This is one of the most consistent and perfectly balanced films of Spielberg's career.
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| Original Score: A
Wildly entertaining from start to finish.
Mr. Spielberg and his company just want you to enjoy yourselves without feeling conned. And they succeed merrily at their noble endeavor.
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| Original Score: A-
It's a technically superb film, shining with all the usual Spielberg flair, expertly utilizing the talents of his top-notch creative team.
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| Original Score: 3/4
If this fact-based tale of a wunderkind swindler suffers from the director's gigantism, it's still lighter on its feet than anything he's made since Jurassic Park.
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| Original Score: B-
Never takes itself or its subjects too seriously, and contains more genuinely funny material than about 90% of the so-called 'comedies' found in multiplexes these days.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Though Catch Me If You Can isn't badly made, the fun slowly leaks out of the movie.
DiCaprio, though 27 when the film was shot, has just the right touch of baby-cheeked deadpan innocence to make you believe in the schemes of this eager boy grifter.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
A meticulously directed, deliciously acted, humorously written work of skill, energy and imagination.
That rarity of rarities, a mainstream American feel-good movie with both charm and intelligence.
DiCaprio's winning performance goes a long way toward encouraging the viewer the forgive the film its indulgences and missteps.
This is a lighter movie than [Spielberg] has made in a long while, and you sense his relief that nothing much is at stake.
