Slattery shows real promise as a director, guiding his actors with ease and effectively evoking a very specific time and place.

| Jun 18, 2016

The film skates unevenly between spit-and-sawdust realism, mean-streets crime anecdote and queasy black comedy, but it's never boring.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 10, 2014

Everyone gets at least one good scene, but the cumulative effect of all these rampaging tragedies and outbreaks of black comedy is ultimately rather exhausting.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 8, 2014

Its cast features some of Hollywood's most redoubtable character actors, among them Philip Seymour Hoffman in one of his final appearances before his untimely death earlier this year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 8, 2014

God's Pocket is the best Pete Dexter film, true to his louche, combative vision, tonally surprising, violent and alarming at one moment, then rudely funny and grotesque.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 8, 2014

An uneven debut from John Slattery that nonetheless shows flashes of flair and a jet-black sense of humour.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 7, 2014

It makes a very plausible whole, and Hoffman is great.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 7, 2014

Like the fortunes of Hoffman's doomed protagonist, goes from bad to worse.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 7, 2014

This is sustained and never less than watchable: a suddenly-major film, clinging on doggedly to its minor-ness.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 7, 2014

For all its vim, the film tries to have its steak and eat it by scolding those who patronise the working man - then getting him drunk and watching him fall over.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 7, 2014

A dud.

| May 22, 2014

Turns out accents and attitude only go so far.

| Original Score: C+ | May 16, 2014

A messy, shallow, muddled morass of a Philadelphia crime story set in 1978 ...

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 16, 2014

What's left is an awkward blend of tragedy and comedy, in a movie that doesn't feel as if it has earned the right to be either.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | May 15, 2014

A fair amount of the film leaves you wondering about the categorizations it's courted as a dark comedy. If the tag legitimately applies, then it takes Slattery a while to find his footing, if he ever really does.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 15, 2014

What began as an intriguing snapshot begins to feel grotesque and inscrutable.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 15, 2014

Who can quibble when the source material is a novel by Peter Dexter ("Paris Trout"), the debut director is John Slattery ("Mad Men") and the actors are such seasoned pros?

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 15, 2014

Though the neighborhood of God's Pocket is fictional, and never precisely located, Slattery's rendering of it is vivid and authentic.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 15, 2014

"God's Pocket" is the kind of film I usually root for: a collage of vignettes about offbeat, colorful characters, played by an A-list cast including the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman

| Original Score: 2.1/2 | May 15, 2014

Mickey is the kind of schlubby loser that Philip Seymour Hoffman excelled at playing, especially in small, indie projects such as this one.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 15, 2014