It seems to glamourise the violence within the prison system, falling back on lazy stereotypes and suggesting that shivving your way to the top can be excused if you have a noble aim.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 17, 2017

On many levels, Shot Caller makes no sense whatsoever.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 15, 2017

The film is aiming for tough edges, but it's essentially very vanilla.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 15, 2017

My expectations here were tepid. But Shot Caller turns out to be a really taut, tense, prison-set thriller, a little like Jacques Audiard's A Prophet and longform television such as Breaking Bad or The Wire.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 14, 2017

If you imagine Andy Dufresne embarking on a hyper-violent gangland crime spree, you've got the premise of this thriller about the corrosive power of prison.

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

As the plot develops it does lose momentum a bit and at times verges on cliche.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 8, 2017

Achieving a hardy balance to a complex character and heightened importance to an otherwise terminally depressing study in total immorality, the star is powerful and so riveting you can't take your eyes off him.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 18, 2017

But despite its unabashed fondness for clichs and tired tropes, Shot Caller mostly succeeds in its aims because of Waugh's sober, matter-of-fact approach to the material.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 18, 2017

Waugh forgoes cheap action-movie gimmicks, offering up instead a haunting psychological portrait of an intelligent man forced to completely reinvent himself before he can even dream of seeking redemption for his previous sins.

| Aug 18, 2017

"Shot Caller" effectively conveys the vise grip of Jacob's options, but that doesn't make it less ludicrous from scene to scene.

| Aug 17, 2017

It always feels like an exercise instead of an examination, a flow chart of bad decisions and explosive violence that may not glorify the poisonous nature of hard time but rarely skims below the surface of what it means to break bad.

| Aug 17, 2017

Shot Caller is a curdled and rancid look at the American dream gone haywire.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 17, 2017

Coster-Waldau ... conveys a strong masculine presence in both sections of the film, and it is fascinating to watch his transformation from privileged family man to hardened con.

| Jun 19, 2017