The Company You Keep Reviews
Top CriticYou can't help but applaud the effort, even as it falls short.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Redford the director keeps things moving smoothly, avoiding too many lengthy monologues while still getting the point across ...
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
A drama that's more than a look at what happened to a generation of socially aware hippies whose new drug of choice is likely Lipitor.
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| Original Score: 3/4
What gets revealed should rattle, but it doesn't.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
You wish the movie were a little snappier, but Redford doesn't do snap; slow down with it, and enjoy the chase.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Directed in steady fashion by Redford, The Company You Keep manages to keep its multiple strands of plot - and the people caught in them - from collapsing in a jumble of confusion.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The film offers a lot to chew on for boomers -- and for aging punks and indie-rockers -- who may still be wondering whether they made a separate peace with The System or simply gave up the fight.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"The Company You Keep" is packaged as a political drama, but at heart it's a preachy nostalgia tour of Vietnam-era liberal doctrine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The high celebrity quotient tends to work against the drama, reminding us what a privileged generation this was and how its endless examination of itself in popular culture was part of that privilege.
This film, with its prickly characters and complicated plot, rips along with continuous tension and power.
"It winds up being less than the sum of its parts."
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
At its core, "The Company You Keep" is a good, solid thriller about a fugitive trying to clear his name. But it's a much more interesting movie at the edges.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The navel-gazing grows obnoxious, especially as the people on screen seem more like archetypes than characters.
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| Original Score: 1.5/5
Redford is interested in telling stories again, rather than pounding us on the head for our civic and historical sins.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Nearly every scene had me asking questions about what just transpired when I should have been absorbing what was happening next.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Sarandon's showpiece sequence, in which Sharon, grilled by the reporter while in FBI custody, stands up for her actions, is easily the film's best.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Drawing skillfully on a first-rate cast, Redford builds a riveting, resonant political thriller that values the complexity of its characters and the intelligence of its audience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Though it makes a few missteps, it's marked by top-notch performances by a terrific ensemble cast, headed by Redford.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"The Company You Keep'' consistently stretches credulity way past the breaking point in its depiction of journalism, police procedure and political activism.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Full of issues, and "relevance," but not enough action, or drama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"The Company You Keep" is a shrewder, more satisfying piece of filmmaking than we've seen from Redford in a while, though not quite in the league with his best behind-the-camera work ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
The film was shot by an excellent cinematographer, Adriano Goldman, though you'd never know it from the lighting, which is as flat as the writing.
This earnest, well-intentioned movie elicits frustration that its story had to be packaged as a conventional, not very suspenseful fugitive thriller with a bogus Hollywood ending.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
It's a pleasure to watch, even if the payoff is rather less substantial than the backstory.
A thoroughly stodgy exploration of the ghosts of the past that has exceedingly little to say about the Vietnam era, the ethics of violent protest or the standards of what's left of the newspaper business.
Though consistently engaging, Redford's latest directorial endeavor does feel like a plea. You can almost hear him coaxing us to learn from the past, even as we rush into the future.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The Company You Keep chews on issues of violence in a muffled way, but restraint is not the quality this story was calling for.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
The disparate elements in The Company You Keep are robustly collated by the keen, well-crafted direction of a master filmmaker at the top of his form. It's only April, but this is one of the best films of 2013.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
[It] might have been more effective if not filtered through so much graybeard griping.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Given the finger-wagging suggestion of its title, it's actually no surprise to find that The Company You Keep turns out to be politically chicken-hearted ...
As an audience, we're forced to admit that the guy we're rooting for could be a sap. This is not a recommended method.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
By the end, it all seems to have been a lot of noise and running for nothing except the ultimate lesson that if journalists like the people they're reporting on, they owe them the favor of not doing journalism. Ta-da!
With a welcome mixture of juice and grit, the movie dramatizes the lingering conundrums of young people in the time of the Vietnam morass.
The pic's colorful, almost-wastefully impressive cast limns a sociologically convincing rogue's gallery of reformed revolutionaries.
Robert Redford makes a welcome return to double-duty as director and lead actor in this clear-eyed drama about a former Weather Underground radical forced to reconcile with the past.
