It's enjoyable and fun to watch, but just barely touches the surface of its own narrative.

| Original Score: B- | Sep 6, 2017

It's a sly film that slips through your fingers, leaving the glitter of great performances, but one you'll be hustling to watch again.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 6, 2017

A movie as smart as 'American Hustle' knows that those tactile pleasures only matter if they're attached to some kind of emotional resonance.

| Jun 18, 2016

Pure, raw energy.

| Original Score: A+ | Apr 23, 2015

Few are the films that can be described as profoundly artistic and deliriously entertaining, substantial and soufflé-like. Noble, and screwy.

| Feb 6, 2015

The movie's greatest strength [is] Russell's magnanimity toward his characters, an equable, never cloying embrace of their imperfections.

| May 22, 2014

Like the Abscam con, the film is a convincing confection, so well played that we don't care if it's the real deal or not.

| Feb 6, 2014

One of the films of the year for me.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 6, 2014

Save your admiration for the performances, especially Lawrence, who is now Hollywood's most important presence in front of the camera.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 8, 2014

It turns out that comb-overs, cleavage, cocaine and kookiness are an unbeatable combo.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 8, 2014

Fun, charming, but slight - and way too long and flabby in the girth for such slightness.

Full Review | Jan 6, 2014

American Hustle doesn't conform to one genre, though it has elements of farce, screwball, heist thriller and caper comedy. In dressing it up like a Scorsese-style crime movie, Russell brings an unusual weight and tension to [the film].

| Jan 3, 2014

Though never boring, American Hustle does itself feel a little like a con - a skilled exercise in creative misdirection.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 3, 2014

You forget that Russell once made such impenetrable navel-gazing twaddle as I Heart Huckabees, and simply revel in the fact that American Hustle is often deliriously good fun.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 22, 2013

Director David O. Russell and co-writer Eric Warren Singer grab hold of the FBI's long-time Abscam sting (conducted in the late '70s into 1980) as their kernel of truth, then Jiffy Pop it like mad.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 20, 2013

Ambitious even as it studies, exploits and explodes ambition, "American Hustle" is as good as any American film this year. It's also a lot of fun. Don't miss it.

| Original Score: A | Dec 20, 2013

American Hustle is a movie built on that cornerstone of the American Dream, reinvention. If you're not happy with who you are, or who people think you are, then go ahead and become somebody else. Anything to survive - and thrive.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 20, 2013

So many layers of double-cross, lies, betrayal, grandiosity, and sheer insanity that the audience may feel they are getting lost, but in a way, that is the point.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 19, 2013

It's one of the year's cleverest films, and also one of the best.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 19, 2013

A sloppy, miscast, hammed up, overlong, overloud story that still sends you out of the theater on a cloud of rapture.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 19, 2013