There are enough twists and grown-up intrigue to keep one asking, "Hey, what's going on here?"

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 9, 2018

David Mamet has a penchant for sleight-of-hand thrillers, and The Spanish Prisoner is his craftiest to date.

Full Review | Nov 20, 2008

The Spanish Prisoner shares with Glengarry Glen Ross a vision of life as a cosmic con game in which the victimizers feed the fantasies of the victims.

| Apr 27, 2007

David Mamet's most consistently enjoyable film to date is a cool, typically clever con-trick drama packed with deliciously inventive twists that get ever more convoluted and unnerving as the plot proceeds.

| Feb 9, 2006

There's something fresh, even restorative, in watching an American studio movie that doesn't treat the movie-going audience like a bunch of gullible marks.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 12, 2002

Mamet brings more than a decade's worth of filmmaking experience to his latest project, and his skill as a director has improved considerably.

| Feb 14, 2001

Mamet's dialogue is as deft as ever, and he draws a fine, complex performance from Scott, an actor whose talents are underused and underappreciated.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

It...has an appealing, ironically rarefied look that the filmmaker measures out carefully, in a story that begins with a seaplane and ends with a ferry.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Mamet keeps the settings simple, breeding mistrust out of the flat walls and corporate colors. He concentrates on dialogue and character, and this movie is warmer, and much closer to psychological realism, than the weirdly schematic House of Games.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

It rolls its sleeves above its elbows to show it has no hidden cards, and then produces them out of thin air.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

It feels rather manipulative and makes us feel a bit too conscious of the trickery at hand, especially given all the film's explicit warnings that things are rarely what they seem, and conversely, that things are usually exactly what they seem to be.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.

| Jan 1, 2000

David Mamet has really stumped us this time. This, his fifth film as writer-director, is his most mainstream work to date, but it also happens to be his cleverest, craftiest and most conniving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: B+ | Sep 8, 1997