Hoskins and Mirren make a formidable pair; their emotional tension matches the physical violence around them, which makes The Long Good Friday into a true powder keg of a gangster melodrama.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 22, 2024

John Mackenzie’s gangster film offers a panorama of Britain’s shifting place in the world during the Seventies.

| May 28, 2024

Without The Long Good Friday, it's hard to imagine the likes of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels existing. To its credit, the film still feels fresh despite its legacy in the movies that followed.

| May 30, 2023

The film lingers in the mind as an exposure of one man's illusions about himself and his world. Reality intrudes upon him like the hands around someone's neck.

| Mar 27, 2018

The simple, almost Shakespearean moral is that nefarious deeds breed a climate of contempt, and that any success will always be tainted.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 23, 2015

Sheer brilliance.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 21, 2015

Both an explosively violent thriller and a sharp evocation of the enterprise culture of the time.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 18, 2015

Hoskins' bullish, black-comic Napoleonism makes this movie: pugnacious, sentimental, a cockney Cagney.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 18, 2015

Has a shaky, peculiarly British charm that still makes it irresistible.

| Original Score: 4 | Jun 15, 2015

Although The Long Good Friday is firmly rooted in a very different era -- early 1980s Britain is another country entirely -- the film still feels fresh and uncompromisingly tough.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 7, 2015

A conventional Brit thriller that's moderately entertaining.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 1, 2014

The screw-turning plot is great fodder for Hoskins and Mirren, who expertly calibrate their stressed-out character arcs. [Blu-ray]

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 29, 2010

In many respects a conventional thriller set in London's underworld, The Long Good Friday is much more densely plotted and intelligently scripted than most such yarns.

| Aug 19, 2008

Its representation of Christ's modern-day doppelganger as a grubby little crimelord is certainly compelling.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 20, 2007

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 14, 2007

John Mackenzie directs this cornerstone of the British gangster genre with a minimum of flash and a dash of grim realism.

| Apr 6, 2006

The admittedly well-constructed set pieces are all too often diminished in effect by the uninspired camera-work.

| Feb 9, 2006

Explosive and original.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 6, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 29, 2005

I have rarely seen a movie character so completely alive. Shand is an evil, cruel, sadistic man. But he's a mass of contradictions, and there are times when we understand him so completely we almost feel affectionate.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 23, 2004