The Benefactor loses whatever anarchic spark it may have had, leaving us with an increasingly empty symphony of its star's repertoire of heavy breathing, blinking and out-of-context laughing.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Feb 28, 2016

Renzi provides a platform for Gere to act in barnstorming fashion but can't work out what to do with any of the other characters. They tend just to stand embarrassed on the sidelines as Gere holds forth and steals every scene in which he appears.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 25, 2016

The Benefactor is a character portrait in search of a movie.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 25, 2016

Gere is committed but his character becomes increasingly annoying, with a one-note tortured past, and the script leaves him and his underwritten co-stars stranded with a pat ending.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 25, 2016

The Benefactor is both a bad film and a thoroughly inexplicable one.

| Feb 25, 2016

Has Richard Gere been hitting the bong?

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 22, 2016

"A compelling portrait of a man on the verge.... Suffers from a sense of rigidity that somehow both fits its themes and stymies a greater sense of realism."

| Original Score: 5/10 | Jan 26, 2016

If the conclusion is a little too sunny, that's a small flaw in an otherwise compelling film about the hazards of trying to buy emotional connection.

| Jan 22, 2016

As a memorable work of cinema, it misses every important mark by a mile.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 21, 2016

Gere, an actor capable of great nuance, hams it up so mightily you'd think the film was sponsored by Boar's Head.

| Original Score: C- | Jan 15, 2016

Fanning has little to do beyond grasping her prosthetic stomach, but James is a decent foil for Gere, who gives form to the highly topical subject of how pain meds destroy lives.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 15, 2016

Gere delivers a performance so self-consciously ACTORISH it often takes us right out of the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5 | Jan 15, 2016

I drove myself crazy trying to find purpose in this story. It plays like a thriller whose thrills have been edited out.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 15, 2016

One of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 15, 2016

What begins as an intriguing psychological thriller devolves ... growing less interesting as it proceeds and giving costars Dakota Fanning and Theo James little to do.

| Jan 14, 2016

Mr. Gere's flamboyant performance is the sole raison d'tre for this melodrama, written and directed by Andrew Renzi. Its other elements are given short shrift.

| Jan 14, 2016

Gere's deft showboating, with Fanning under-compensating beautifully at the other end of the seesaw, is quite enough to carry a movie whose potency surely depends on not spelling things out.

| Jan 14, 2016

The only remarkable thing about it is Gere, who really should stick to filmmakers worthy of his talent.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 14, 2016

Why hire Fanning, a gifted performer under the right circumstances, and then waste her presence on a nothing role?

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 14, 2016

Sadly, The Benefactor proves less rich and engaging as it settles into its actual genre: It's yet another troubled-dude-starts-pulling-it-together tale.

| Jan 12, 2016