It's more concerned with flattering our modern sensibility than truly plunging us into the mores of the 1920s.

| Apr 6, 2020

It's not Goodfellas. It lacks the black humour and the relish for eccentricity for its own sake, and the ending verges on mawkishness. But it's great entertainment -- a cunningly wrought tribute to old-fashioned Hollywood and the Warners style.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 27, 2017

Live By Night is a confusing jumble. But above all, it commits the cardinal sin of gangster movies: It's really, really boring.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 25, 2017

Individual sequences are also compellingly handled and, as Affleck has demonstrated in his previous films as director... he's an accomplished storyteller.Yet the film doesn't entirely hang together.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 20, 2017

You probably won't turn it off when it comes on cable. But the material needs to be bigger, more momentous, as well as more intimate.

| Jan 17, 2017

One of the film's final set pieces is so wonderfully staged that it reminds you what skill Affleck has with the camera. Next time, he should perhaps confine himself behind it.

| Jan 16, 2017

A handsome period drama with the occasional impressive flourish, but despite its rich subject matter, it's Affleck's weakest film yet as a director.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 16, 2017

It feels like a facsimile of prohibition America, a Vegas casino recreation rather than the real thing, lacking the grit and spit and sawdust of a country hurtling into the Great Depression.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 16, 2017

Affleck the director has a good eye for detail, but he was let down by Affleck the screenwriter and Affleck the actor, who gives the weakest performance in the film.

| Original Score: C | Jan 13, 2017

The movie, for all its technical genius, even with such a strong, electrifying cast, just isn't very good, and as such watching it shoot so many blanks for over two full hours is nothing short of a colossal waste of time.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 13, 2017

Live by Night is a solid, interesting but sprawling and often overwrought gangster picture.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 13, 2017

A footnote in the history of cinematic mob stories.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 13, 2017

It ain't rubbish, but Affleck's fly-by-night operation is still one to avoid.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 13, 2017

Here, the outlaw-as-hero trick just doesn't work; we can't both sympathize with Coughlin's moral quandaries and thrill to his crimes.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 13, 2017

It sure looks great - it was lensed by Tarantino regular Robert Richardson - and its gangster-movie tropes are familiar, yet welcome.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 13, 2017

Flat when it should fizzle, formulaic when it should be diverting and plodding when it should flow, it is at best -- and it pains me to say it -- a masterclass in mediocrity.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 12, 2017

Live By Night feels toothless even as blood sprays and bodies fall.

| Jan 12, 2017

Affleck falls prey to the occupational hazard of wanting to create his own myth, as he produces, directs, writes and stars in a flaccid screen adaptation of Dennis Lehane's Prohibition-era crime novel.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 12, 2017

The film strives for Roman Polanski's Chinatown, but sadly ends up closer to Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 12, 2017

Misgivings aside, I was enjoying Live by Night as a guilty pleasure of sorts and was on the verge of giving it a qualified recommendation until the last 10 minutes, which are equal parts predictable and way, way over the top.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 12, 2017