Stripped to its bones, Heat may sound trite. But Mann puts so much flesh on his characters that you never feel hungry.

| Dec 21, 2023

Like Kubrick, Mann takes a genre premise that seems like no big deal, and expands it into a cosmos of its own. Heat might simply be the most spectacular B-movie ever made, but that’s impressive enough.

| Dec 21, 2023

Dream match-ups on paper don't always succeed on the screen -- like twin fires fighting for oxygen, will they merely cancel each other out? Hardly. This is one titanic clash that actually lives up to the billing.

| Dec 21, 2023

Above all, the dialogue is complex enough to allow the characters to say what they're thinking: They are eloquent, insightful, fanciful, poetic when necessary. They're not trapped with clichés.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 21, 2023

At its core it's actually about virtuosity... and, by extension, the virtuosity of Mann himself, of which there's no short supply. Too bad it's running on empty; if the film weren't so hollow it would be a masterpiece.

| Dec 21, 2023

Time and again, Heat veers sharply out of the groove worn by a thousand other movies. As I said, it's not an ordinary movie -- indeed, it's an extraordinary one, with compelling performances, a fascinating mix of characters and a riveting story line.

| Dec 21, 2023

There's not a boring building in the film. Mann is the best director of architecture since Antonioni. In fact, few film-makers at work today can rival Mann's control of every detail of the film-making process.

| Dec 21, 2023

Flaws notwithstanding, you've got to salute the size and richness and technical dazzle that sustain Mann's impressive vision.

| Dec 21, 2023

It is huge commercial grandstanding by all involved, and will satisfy no one hoping for a mano-a-mano acting clinic. But hey, it could have been Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 21, 2023

Mann understands what too many directors, impressed by their credentials, do not; when Pacino and De Niro talk, the audience listens. We don't need to be browbeaten. Mann extends that respect for all of Heat.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 21, 2023

Occasionally, Heat rises to the level of good slush 온라인카지노추천, but when Mann succumbs to De Niro and Pacino worship and takes himself too seriously, the results are lukewarm.

| Dec 21, 2023

The splendid visuals aside, Heat is a cosmically silly movie -- which doesn't make it any less entertaining. Mann manages to have his romance of obsessed masculinity and send it up too.

| Dec 21, 2023

We are being asked to spend inordinate amounts of our time sitting through a single movie... Be that as it may, and much as I hate to encourage this sort of thing, I cannot come up with a single second of Heat that I could have done without.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 20, 2023

Heat is overlong at 180 minutes, but it justifies the indulgence with a relentless pace and a wealth of fine acting.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 20, 2023

This is a movie with the makings of a classic -- a tough criminal yarn which has the muscular intelligence of a Howard Hawks picture, updated through the greater depth and weight accorded to its female characters.

| Dec 20, 2023

Michael Mann's Heat raises an old question about Hollywood aesthetics. Does banality improve with grandiloquence? Or do fancy sounds and gestures make the trite triter?

| Dec 20, 2023

Every time Al Pacino and Robert De Niro try to light a fire under Heat, writer-director-producer Michael Mann dumps water on them.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 20, 2023

In Mann's intricate, sprawling screenplay, he tells a story that stretches way beyond the film's nominal subject matter and catches something deep and elemental.

| Dec 20, 2023

Although there is much that is impressive and pleasurable in this film, it left me somewhat disappointed. Mann's determination to forge an epic, almost three hours' long, leads him to stretch the script thin.

| Dec 20, 2023

Baby, somebody light this fire. Heat is an incoherent, overlong zero that lasts almost three hours.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 20, 2023