This queer period drama has good intentions, but the glaring combination of rote material and poor acting is particularly damning.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 18, 2024

It’s Styles over substance.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 16, 2022

It is acutely scripted, sensitively directed and finely acted, including by the pop star-turned actor Harry Styles, who is the policeman of the title.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 11, 2022

As a gentle period romance, the film mostly works, particularly whenever Dawson’s mesmerizing performance is front and center. As a launching pad for Styles’ acting career, however, "My Policeman" fails to get off the ground.

| Original Score: B- | Nov 8, 2022

The longer it goes, the better My Policeman gets, largely because it describes a beautiful and terrible story.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 3, 2022

If anyone is still wondering whether the pop star Harry Styles can act, “My Policeman” should put all doubts to rest.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 3, 2022

There are enough secrets, lies and tepidly chaste sex scenes – both of the straight and same-sex variety – to fill a hundred kitchen sinks. But the resulting drama is all drips and drops, no deluge.

| Nov 1, 2022

My Policeman is held back by its lack of insight into the psychology of its characters and Michael Grandage's stiff presentation.

| Original Score: C- | Oct 27, 2022

My advice: if you read something negative about My Policeman, ignore it and see this exemplary film for yourself. You’ll be glad you did.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 26, 2022

The best that can be said about Styles is that his is not the worst performance in Michael Grandage’s uninspired plodder, but that’s not much of an endorsement, given the half-hearted work from most of the cast.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 23, 2022

It’s admirable to see a superstar test his range, even if the results suggest that it’s not nearly as wide as the stages he headlines.

| Oct 21, 2022

The film has nothing to add to the canon of depressing LGBTQ+ period dramas that’s profound enough to overcome the story’s dreary packaging.

| Oct 21, 2022

An absorbing, resonant, deeply wistful adaptation of the 2012 novel by Bethan Roberts that will probably be best appreciated... if judged more within the context of its mainly mid-20th century setting than by contemporary expectations.

| Oct 21, 2022

A deliberately paced, melancholy period piece about love, loss, pain, prejudice and the danger of living inauthentically.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 21, 2022

Come for Harry, stay for a barnstorming Gina McKee performance.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 21, 2022

It’s meant to be sexy but it just made me laugh and then I felt rotten, because this is so earnest.

| Oct 21, 2022

There are times when the actors playing the main characters in the 1990s scenes seem so far removed from the actors playing those same characters in the 1950s, it’s as if we’re watching two separate movies.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 20, 2022

My Policeman’s ambitions are grand. Anna Karenina, really? None are realized, and instead of a classic tragic romance, it ends up being a turgid, airless concoction.

| Original Score: C- | Oct 20, 2022

[Harry Styles] doesn't have the technique to convey whatever ideas he may have had about his character... The travesty is that a powerful lead performance might have elevated Grandage's film to a superior category.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 20, 2022

Grandage and his cast approach it with such enormous restraint, the oxygen is cut off completely. This is bloodless filmmaking.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 20, 2022