Ropey graphics and sub-Scarface synth music simply add to the feeling that you're getting a low budget experience.

Full Review | Feb 6, 2018

A documentary examining the Miami drug wars of the early 1980s in exhaustive - and occasionally nauseating - detail.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 6, 2018

Grisly crime scene snaps accompany the story, which makes Miami Vice look like a tea party and Florida like hell on earth.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 23, 2007

The haystacks of cash and coke are laughably insane - as is the head-count: thousands of people were gunned to death. This is the only state in the world where Scarface might raise a smile.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 23, 2007

Too often the film crosses the line between recording his subjects' illegal activities and aggrandising them.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 23, 2007

It's the sort of glamour-meets-violence drugs-crime story on which lads' mags thrive: unqualified, over-reverent and hysterical.

| Original Score: 2/6 | Nov 22, 2007

Fast-paced and fascinating, but a little too frenetic for its own good.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 3, 2007

The Jan Hammer music on the soundtrack works overtime to assure us that Cocaine Cowboys is the real, nastier version of Miami Vice

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 1, 2006

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 18, 2006

This is an ugly film, but with an undeniable allure.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 10, 2006

Forget Scarface and Miami Vice. Cocaine Cowboys is the real deal -- a down-and-dirty look at the high living and illegal drugs that dominated south Florida in the 1980s.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 10, 2006

This documentary on Miami's lethal '80s cocaine scene is cut fast.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 10, 2006

At half the length it would have been twice as good, but nevertheless it stokes a nostalgia some may have for a magic period in Miami history when it was ever so briefly the American Casablanca.

| Nov 9, 2006

After beginning at a healthy clip, the film becomes mired in endless remembrances of debaucheries past and Miami's descent into lawlessness.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 9, 2006

While the filmmakers clearly got a contact high from hearing all these war stories, most civilians will find a little of this goes a long way.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 2, 2006

Cocaine Cowboys' pulpy entertainment value merely lures us into a grim, kaleidoscopic look at how one city was both destroyed and, ironically, eventually saved by some of the worst human beings to walk the Earth.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2006

As sensational as Scarface and a lot livelier than that Miami Vice movie.

Full Review | Oct 30, 2006

A hyperventilating account of the blood-drenched Miami drug culture in the 1970s and 80s.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 30, 2006

Cocaine Cowboys is kinetic and absorbing, the documentary equivalent of GoodFellas.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Oct 28, 2006

Parts of Cocaine Cowboys manage the impossible -- making cocaine boring. But the film doesn't shy away from presenting horrific images: We see blood-streaked walls, bullet-perforated bodies and Katie Couric's haircut circa 1981.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 27, 2006