What is perhaps most remarkable about Bale's and Adams's performances is that they supply depth and nuance to a film whose director appears to have had no appetite for either quality.

| Jan 29, 2019

Despite this ongoing fishing analogy, it never actually manages to land the big fish.

| Jan 29, 2019

When a movie's premise is that its subject single-handedly moulded recent history, you want more depth and grandeur than this one provides.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 27, 2019

Bale credited "Satan" for inspiration for the role, and it shows.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 26, 2019

These days, everyone is yelling, and that includes the makers of Vice. The title has a double-meaning but I'd suggest a third: watching the film feels like having your head stuck in a...

| Jan 26, 2019

You would struggle to find many nuances in Bale's performance, but this is a grand example of what Orson Welles used to call "King acting".

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 25, 2019

It's a skilled piece of comic acting which has the unlikely effect of making Cheney buffoonish as well as sinister... But McKay is quick to remind us what happened on Cheney's watch.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 25, 2019

It's a more ambitious political satire...Because it's about real people, real politicians and real deranged ambitions, and it places much of the blame for today's geopolitical ills...directly at their door. Oh, and it's also very funny.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2019

Vice is a big fat mess of a film about a big fat mess (courtesy of script and make-up department) of an anti-hero.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 23, 2019

It's an exhilarating explosion of a biopic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 23, 2019

It is a head-spinning shock-and-awe satire that comes in hot then cranks up the thermostat to infernal - a Molotov cocktail of biopic, documentary and black comedy, with a thrillingly short fuse.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 22, 2019

Bale's a riot, but it's The Big Short 2.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 22, 2019

You have to admit that this cynical and methodically researched film isn't pulling any punches.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 18, 2019

Vice worked my last nerve. It's true, I turned on it early, but trust me when I say it did nothing to endear itself to me as it went on.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 7, 2019

In theory, there's no reason why this approach shouldn't work -- if the jokes were better and the black comedy was blacker. But McKay isn't really interested in Cheney as anything but a target.

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 4, 2019

... the best American film of the year, a stinging satire of which Jonathan Swift might not have been ashamed.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 2, 2019

Vice isn't a dishonest movie, exactly. It just enables dishonesty.

| Dec 28, 2018

Given the present partisan chasm, though, it feels nihilistic to laugh at a movie that so puckishly delights in further polarizing Republicans and Democrats.

| Dec 27, 2018

You cannot simply sit and absorb this movie. Love it or hate it, you are one of its characters.

| Dec 27, 2018

In Adam McKay's free-ranging, tone-shifting, darkly funny, super-meta, hit-and-miss, absurdist biopic Vice, Bale nails it as the resilient, backstabbing, front-stabbing, ruthlessly ambitious Cheney.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 26, 2018