Road to Perdition (2002)

All Critics (209) | Top Critics (44) | Fresh (181) | Rotten (38) | DVD (38)

So is Perdition still a must-see? No question. But it's tough to fuss about it much when a picture is this fussy.

April 14, 2013 Full Review

Mike Clark

USA Today

Top Critic

Visually, the picture is all of a piece, but it's a self-conscious piece of work -- all dark-toned academic classicism.

April 14, 2013 Full Review

David Denby

New Yorker

Top Critic

What makes the movie pay off is moving pictures of real action and of intimate scenes between man and boy that are all the more moving for being understated.

April 14, 2013 Full Review

Joe Morgenstern

Wall Street Journal

Top Critic

While crisply edited and unindulgent, Mendes' work is gratifyingly old-school in its rejection of modern-day stylistic agitation, the better to achieve a slow but inexorable build to its climax.

August 8, 2008 Full Review

Todd McCarthy

Variety

Top Critic

Sam Mendes's 2002 follow-up to American Beauty finds him every bit as adept, arty, and Oscar hungry.

April 17, 2007 Full Review

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Chicago Reader

Top Critic

Ploughing a furrowed brow, Hanks is fatally miscast -- except that the story turns so sentimental and bathetic, he's actually in his element.

February 9, 2006 Full Review

Geoff Andrew

Time Out

Top Critic

Powerful, beautiful film; ok for mature teens.

December 29, 2010 Full Review

Nell Minow

Common Sense Media

The top-billed actors deliver: Hanks with his resonant reserve and Newman in conveying Rooney's failed attempt to live up to his self-image as the ultimate just and loving patriarch. [Blu-ray]

August 2, 2010 Full Review

Peter Canavese

Groucho Reviews

...it all works surprisingly well for so simple a story, and it involves the audience in its action from beginning to end. (Blu-ray Edition)

July 28, 2010 Full Review

John J. Puccio

Movie Metropolis

...something more than the sum of its parts; namely, a gripping, touching, entertaining motion picture.

July 28, 2010 Full Review

John J. Puccio

Movie Metropolis

This last motif surges in the film's coda with a sequence that is 2002's most rapturous, a long, undulating shot that combines serenity and horror.

July 6, 2010 Full Review

Peter Keough

Boston Phoenix

Director Sam Mendes is on course to become one of the great directors of this decade.

July 6, 2010 Full Review

Garth Franklin

Dark Horizons

From the first ten minutes you can already guess this is a true epic and masterpiece.

April 29, 2009 Full Review | Comment (1)

Felix Vasquez Jr.

Cinema Crazed

It's Newman who really stands out. Despite his advanced years -- he's 77 -- the man still has remarkable presence.

October 1, 2008 Full Review

Daniel Etherington

Film4

Hanks and Newman are the personification of anguish and torn loyalty in a gripping, violent film that is part character study and part cat-and-mouse chase with classic western embellishments.

August 7, 2008 Full Review

Mark Halverson

Sacramento News & Review

Road is so beautiful, so well composed and so tidy in its sense of justice that it never quite gets its hands dirty enough to evoke any true emotion.

July 14, 2007 Full Review

Joe Lozito

Big Picture Big Sound

A simple parable, starkly outlined, with talented actors shading these sketches with wisdom and detail.

December 6, 2004

Jeffrey Overstreet

Looking Closer

• 1. Michael Sullivan: I saw then that my father's only fear was that his son would follow the same road. And that was the last time I ever held a gun. People always thought I grew up on a farm. And I guess, in a way, I did. But I lived a lifetime before that, in those six weeks on the road in the winter of 1931. When people ask me if Michael Sullivan was a good man, or if there was just no good in him at all, I always give the same answer. I just tell them... he was my father.
  – Submitted by Bkas M (20 months ago)
• 1. Peter Sullivan: Why are you always smiling?
  2. Connor Rooney: 'Cause it's all so fucking hilarious.
  – Submitted by Kase V (22 months ago)
• 1. Michael Sullivan Jr.: When people ask me if Michael Sullivan was a good man, or if there was just no good in him at all, I always give the same answer. I just tell them, he was my father.
  – Submitted by Robert R (24 months ago)
• 1. Maguire: I shoot the dead. Dead bodies, that is. I don't kill them.
  – Submitted by Chris P (2 years ago)
• 1. Michael Sullivan: Is that, uh... your profession or... your pleasure?
  2. Maguire: Both, I guess. To be paid to do what you love... ain't that the dream?
  – Submitted by Chris P (2 years ago)

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