Sleuth.

"It's tempting to call the new Sleuth a soulless remake, but that would imply that the original had a soul," writes Fernando F Croce at Slant. "What keeps the film's motor running is the interplay between the two actors. [Jude] Law has the opaque agility of a cunning scam artist, but it's [Michael] Caine's look of bemused wryness (the way he sizes up his younger co-star as if to say, 'I were you once, kid') that almost makes one believe there's something remotely human at stake in the picture's vacant ingenuity."

"[Anthony] Shaffer's play had a political context that, however crude, gave it some urgency," writes David Edelstein in New York. "At the height of the counterculture, he was trying to expose the snobbish, reactionary, patriarchal bigotry and xenophobia at the heart of the drawing-room English whodunit. [Director Kenneth] Branagh and [screenwriter Harold] Pinter don't have any larger purpose."

Updated through 10/13.

"[T]his tiresome rehash seems motivated by little more than the urge to bludgeon us with uppercase Cinema," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "Shaffer's tired bromides about the potency of wealth and cunning, and the supposedly primal struggle of two males more in love with one another than with the woman they seek to possess, remain in Branagh's hands little more than a pissing contest energized by crude homophobia and misogyny."

For the New York Times, Sarah Lyall profiles the screenwriter: "Pinter writes in a handsome study on the second floor of a two-story brownstone in west London, just behind the house he shares with his wife, the writer Lady Antonia Fraser. Tucked in a corner of the downstairs office is a table covered with awards he has amassed in his career as a playwright, director, actor, political provocateur, poet and screenwriter, including the French Légion d'Honneur, the Franz Kafka Award and the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature."

Earlier: Reviews from Venice.

Updates, 10/11: "Sleuth is well acted, and directed by Branagh with chilly, distant ingenuity," writes Andrew O'Hehir at Salon. "It has a certain edge and daring, or more to the point it pretends to. That goes some distance toward concealing that Sleuth is a horrible mismatch of writer and material, and that the story (if we must dignify this fevered paranoid fantasy with that term) is absolute nonsense."

"Kenneth Branagh's direction imitates De Palma's multi-angled voyeurism, but the trite visual tricks interrupt the clipped language and tense interaction that are British theater's domain," writes Armond White in the New York Press.

Updates, 10/12: Michael Caine tells the LA CityBeat's Andy Klein about getting searched at the airport: "The guy said, 'I love you, you're my favorite actor!' And I said, 'Well, what are you treating me like a terrorist for if I'm your favorite actor?' He said, 'Because we have to. The computer says we've got to do that.'" The great fun of this piece is that Andy Klein clearly loves Michael Caine as much as those of us who really love Michael Caine do: "Listening to that iconic voice, it's as though you're in the presence of Harry Palmer from The Ipcress File, Peachy Carnahan from The Man Who Would Be King, Alfred Pennyworth from Batman Begins, and Milo Tindle from the first Sleuth - almost 35 years ago."

But as for the new one, "what was once insignificant is now insufferable, though, at 86 minutes, almost an hour shorter," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"So what went wrong? Why is this new Sleuth so flaccid, so pretentious, so unengaging?" asks Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "Let's start with the material..."

"Language this lethal has all but disappeared from the movies, and it's an unmitigated pleasure to observe Caine and Law attack it with such ferocity," counters Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Sleuth is nasty fun." And Patrick Goldstein profiles Caine.

Updates, 10/13: "On consecutive weeks back in December 1972, the Palomar production company and 20th Century-Fox teamed to release two films: Sleuth and The Heartbreak Kid," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "Now, on consecutive weekends in October 2007, come remakes of those movies. As it happens, the original Sleuth and Heartbreak were smart and funny and took a fairly brutal view of their main characters. The remakes, though honoring the basic plots of their predecessors, are dumb, witless and humiliating to all parties."

Online listening tip. Alex Chadwick talks with Caine for NPR.

Posted by dwhudson at October 10, 2007 7:03 AM