The Iceman Reviews
Even the always-watchable Shannon can't give much life to Kuklinski's two-dimensional presence: he's little more than a series of murders and pained looks.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Shannon gets at his character's pent-up torment as well as his efficient disconnect. When his two worlds start to converge -- on his daughter's sweet 16th birthday, no less -- you feel for him.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A true-crime thriller directed with grit, gristle and punchy energy by Ariel Vromen, The Iceman is never less than fascinating, even if things get a little ham-fisted here and there.
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| Original Score: 3/4
As the body count mounts, the movie begins to spin out of control, but Shannon and Vromen don't let it derail. Their focus keep things from melting down.
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| Original Score: B
Michael Shannon is an overpowering actor, and in The Iceman, the best that he can do is wrestle the movie around him to a stalemate.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It's a fascinating subject - the beast that lurks inside the family man - but the movie blows it.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It's often mesmerizing, primarily for Shannon's performance as a man who's a master of compartmentalizing ...
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's as if one of the sideline characters from "Goodfellas" or "The Godfather" starred in his own spinoff.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
As both violent drama and character study, Israeli director Ariel Vromen's film does everything it should.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This biopic sounds like a perfect vehicle for Shannon, who's come to specialize in playing psychopaths, but it doesn't give him much to work with.
Why would anyone want to watch something so determinedly downbeat, so unerringly serious? Because of the performances, Shannon's in particular.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Toronto Star
Top CriticThe script ... offers few insights into Kuklinski's psychic makeup or motivations and even less reason to care about them.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
While Hollywood keeps coughing up comedies and thrillers about sympathetic hitmen, the true story dramatized in "The Iceman" should bury those noxious fantasies forever.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Just when you think you've seen enough of these wiseguys, along comes a story like Kuklinski's, and an actor like Shannon.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Iceman offers a chronological view into the life of its title protagonist... and what a life it is.
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| Original Score: 3/4
There's not much style here, beyond the uniformly good acting, and even less of a point.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"The Iceman's" problem rests instead with the script, which the director wrote with Morgan Land, his collaborator on the "Rx" screenplay. It never gets underneath Kuklinski's skin in a way that illuminates the psychosis.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Michael Shannon's mesmerizing portrayal of Richard Kuklinski, a notorious contract killer, has the paradoxical quality, peculiar to many great screen performances, of being unreadable and transparent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Shannon inhabits this character so completely that by the end of this hard-to-watch, hard-to-look-away-from movie you feel you can, if not understand Richie, at least wish he had found some redemption in life.
Shannon is brilliantly unnerving as he callously dispenses with people, then returns home to maintain his façade of a loving husband and father.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Michael Shannon moves through "The Iceman" like a shark.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Shannon could be looking at an Oscar nomination. His performance is that stone-cold good.
A sketchy, flatly directed biopic based on one of the most compelling true crime stories out of New Jersey ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
With his chiseled-from-granite brow and harrowing, coiled-spring intensity, Michael Shannon is one of those actors who can make just about any movie interesting. And he has his work cut out for him in The Iceman ...
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
Michael Shannon is so fascinating that I was honestly rooting for him to survive. The point of The Iceman is "Even monsters are human," but it takes a great actor to make a dubious theme convincing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
This is a wise-guy opera with barely one memorable aria.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Shannon gives an unnerving performance as a man caged in a cruel apathy, maintaining a controlled façade that seems to twitch with barely sublimated distress.
A finely chiseled thriller that reflects the cold-blooded efficiency of its murderous subject in every frame and detai
The redoubtable Michael Shannon leads a superb cast in Ariel Vromen's compelling portrait of New Jersey career criminal Richard Kuklinski.
A nagging question looms over the entire endeavor: Do you care?
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
