I usually like John Sayles but this one is a little more complicated..and like with all his films nothing is ever tied up in a nice bow at the end ..good performance by Chris Cooper..I only wish the movie was more about him instead of the Danny Huston character,still it's an interesting companion piece to Fast Food Nation.

It's inconsistent in tone. The lead is uninteresting. Seems a bit unfocused at times. Not a total mess, but one that could have benefited from a bit more fine-tuning.

There's no doubt that John Sayles has made better films than "Silver City", but that doesn't mean that his film is inferior. No, it has a great deal to offer, such as a top-notch cast, clever writing, and spot-on editing. The film's pacing and inconsistent camerawork may try the patience of some, but there is an engaging story here.

This movie was too heavy handed, and I didn't particularly like the main character.

Great cast, great premise but overlong. Veiled attack on George W. Bush and his administration. Good to see Danny Huston in a lead role.

another winner from one of the great under appreciated American directors, great emsenable cast really brin gs this multi-layered story about politics.

Love Chris Cooper (doing a nice Dubya impression no less), but I didn't get the point of this movie at all.

Nette Besetzung, allerdings ist der Plot ein bisschen sehr löchrig und unspannend.

sharp satire, fine enough ...

Decent movie good acting, the stories not the greatest but worth a free rental or get it from library.

Starts out promising and funny but becomes increasingly tedious. I stopped it with 15 minutes left, it was so pointless.

I have a lot of time for John Sayles -- who else makes the kind of movies that he does? Multi-character, multi-cultural, kinda preachy but with that "fight the power" spirit. This "detective story" takes on the corporations that are despoiling the environment and buying politicians to help them do it. A few star turns and Chris Cooper does GWB.

sayles touches on a lot of different topics in this biting critique of politics, big business and everything in between - even religion. funny at times, poignant at others. a great cast that delivers great performances. it's a little longer than it needs to be due to the labyrinthine plot, which i think could have been trimmed a bit without any damage to the film. nevertheless it was worth watching.

One of Sayles' worst. Meh.

Depressing take off on bushiepoo and Carl Rove, lifting frequently from their real life background... scarily real

Back in 2004 there were all kinds of movies taking jabs at George W. in one way or another. Michael Moore tried directly. Silver City, from director John Sayles, takes a more subtle approach. Sayles fifteenth film as writer-director-editor is filled with wild ambition. And he scores a casting coup by having Oscar winner Chris Cooper star as the Dubya figure. Cooper stars as Dickie Pilager, a not-so-sly dig at Bush's environmental policies. Dickie isn't yet president, nor is he from Texas. He's running for governor of Colorado, where his father, longtime senator Jud Pilager (Michael Murphy), is a major power figure. Jud is looking to maintain that power by using his cronies to get his dumb son into office. Cooper is at his loosest and funniest as Dickie, using a little bit of Dubya syntax in his language and employing his trademark lost look. Dickie is nothing more than an empty suit controlled by nefarious puppeteers. This makes for frustrating limitations for Cooper's performance, as well as the movie as a whole. Sayles mixes the humor with Chinatown-style noir. A dead body floats up in a Colorado lake as Dickie is shooting a campaign commercial, an event that spurs Dickie's campaign manager, Chuck Raven (Richard Dreyfuss, more brutally funny than he was allowed to be in W.) to hire Danny O'Brien, a reporter turned detective played wonderfully by Danny Huston (son of legendary director John Huston). As with all of his films (Lone Star, City of Hope, Sunshine State), Sayles is interested in exploring the roots of corruption, but such ambition is unfortunately held back due to the love story involving Danny and his ex-lover (Maria Bello). But Silver City is filled with undeniably wicked mischief. Take Daryl Hannah as Dickie's sexy, but screwed-up sister, or Billy Zane as a lobbyist without a soul. Dreyfuss digs into his role, chewing on the snappy lines he gets, such as when be explains that Dickie will promise the Christian right that he will preserve cultural equilibrium, which translates into (his words) 'no handouts for homos'. Sayles obviously bites off more than he can chew, even with a $5.5 million film, but it's a risky bite, one that counts in Teflon Hollywood.

A disappointment from a stellar actor (Cooper) and director (Sayles).

John Sayles politiska satir är en märkvärdig sådan. Här fokuserar han sig kring guvernörskandidaten Dickie Pilager och hans mentor och hjärna bakom projektet Chuck Raven (den som kan lista ut vilka dessa två herrar är baserade på får en karamell). Men Sayles låter de två politiska rävarna bara agera som skuggspel för historien som han verkligen vill berätta. Den som pågår bakom omgivningens stängda ögon. Silver City är så fylld utav tredimensionella karaktärer och ingen blir lämnad därhän och inget blir lämnat åt slumpen. John Sayles visar, återigen, varför han är en av filmvärldens absolut bästa skapare.

This came out pre-election. What does it look like post? Great. Chris Cooper delivers best-ever Bush interpretation. Dreyfus does Chaney long before "W". The story? Another genogram, this time cultural shame, where, as always, the casualty of truth leads to various deceptions and cover-ups that cause various degrees of problems. The stakes at center? In general, real estate, Sayles's target in all his films. The valuing of property over people, in this case Mexican immigrants, and anyone else seeking the truth, in this case our Marlovian protagonist Danny O'Brien, played agreeably by Danny Huston. In Sayles's films everyone is always articulate and real, and once in a while this kind of movie provides an antidote to American-style unrealism. As always, Sayles provokes the sore around the wound of politics and finds everyone lapsing in values: right, left, government, politician, investigators, lobbyists, business people. As always, the top dogs require the underdogs in order to have their feeding frenzy over the land rights, while everyone but the little guy snags a piece of the pie. In the end we get an extended sequence recapping those who were used and misused in order to make the deal go through, and it's not according to political bent that we see these people in the closing shots. We close on the same scene we opened on, Pilager (aka George Bush) speeching about protecting the land and developing it, and the fish pop up to the most ironic placing of the song "America, America" we've seen in a while. Message clear. What's great is the use of neo-noir detective genre to tell the story. Film at its best is about expressing truth, and like Marlowe, Sayles isn't about taking sides as much as he is about seeing what is, and maybe getting the girl. At least for Sayles it's about love. It's not that love conquers all, it's that at least there's love to choose as a value, a friendly companion to truth. One of many worthwhile Sayles films that do mean what they say and demonstrate a fierce commitment to the integrity of vision in the arts. And Daryl Hannah simply rocks.

Lone Star Lite. Sayles has something to say about politics, corruption, bullying and corporate control, but the overwritten script seems to lend itself towards a mini-series than a film. All this worked so well in Lone Star, but it just feels muddled and mundane here. Not only do we have multiple characters interacting through a mystery involving age-old corruption, we even have a dead body discovered at the beginning and some daddy issues. While Lone Star's screenplay gave its characters meaningful lines that shed light on their histories and, once in a while, advanced the plot, the dialog here feels repetitive and stagy. Characters talk to themselves for no other reason than to make sure we know what just happened in the scene. With some revisions this screenplay could have been a nice little platform for some fine performances, unfortunately you can sense the showboating from Danny Huston (normally a magnet on the screen) from his first scene. Chris Cooper (can the man do no wrong?) shows a glimmer of magnificence in his far too small role (think McConaughey in Lone Star except Cooper is someone I prefer in a large role), but the rest of the cast feels like a collection of b-list stars hoping to be a part of something big. It isn't without it's moments and you've got to give Sayles credit for making a narrative with little more than a Michael Moore-ian rant against all that he sees wrong with American politics and journalism behind it.