Based on Mamet's experience as a freighter on the Great Lakes while a grad English lit student, Mantegna's screen version is so dramatically inert and artistically shapeless resulting in an uninvolving memory film.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Aug 28, 2006

Watching it, you come to understand what it is that Mamet has been true to all these years.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 7, 2002

As drama, it's not much; as a meditation on language and storytelling, it's a treat.

| Jan 4, 2002

'Yeah. It's alright.' 'Good enough for me.'

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 30, 2001

A first-rate movie made from one of David Mamet's lesser plays.

| Dec 7, 2001

Where Mantegna succeeds is in providing a forum for some great acting.

Full Review | Dec 6, 2001

Lakeboat requires its audiences to embrace it as lovingly as Mamet and Mantegna embrace its men, but it's a lot to ask.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 28, 2001

As with any Mamet script, the cast is all, and these old boys take his macho monologues and make them sound like Homer.

Full Review | Sep 20, 2001

More play than movie. But it's unusual for either. It's neither plot-driven like many plays nor action- and image-driven like most movies.

| Sep 14, 2001

The raw raunch and the latent yearning and pain [Mamet] sets down here with such assurance yield a movie of special rewards.

Full Review | Jun 29, 2001

There's enough there to make it of interest to more than Mamet completists.

Full Review | Jun 29, 2001

The script is so inherently stagy that setting the film on a real boat doesn't pay off.

Full Review | Jun 29, 2001

I once taught a class on Mamet's films. I wish I could have opened it with this one, because for Mamet, it all starts here.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 1, 2001

This early effort is more a curiosity piece than anything else.

Full Review | May 31, 2001

An elegiac and tartly amusing tribute to a group of guys trying to make the most of the hand life has dealt them.

| Apr 23, 2001

The film's chief pleasure, a considerable one, is in hearing Mr. Mamet's characteristic idiom ... so close to its real-world source.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 20, 2001

The piece is a theatrical curio, but no less fascinating for that.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 18, 2001