The Company You Keep

Directed by Robert Redford

(R)

**

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Robert Redford’s “terribly clumsy” new drama squanders heaps of talent, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. The star, director, and producer surrounded himself with fine actors in this story about a 1970s radical who’s forced onto the run three decades later, but “its structure is so cockeyed” that the suspense never takes. Playing the reporter whose digging triggers the hunt, Shia LaBeouf “is the film’s standout,” said Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times. As Redford’s Nick Sloan contacts former compatriots in his bid to escape arrest for a 30-year-old bank robbery that resulted in a guard’s death, Susan Sarandon, Nick Nolte, and Julie Christie also come through playing the “showy moments” that the script offers them. But Redford, at 76, looks “at least a decade too old to play a 1970s radical,” and that’s not the only place where the movie “stretches credulity way past the breaking point,” said Lou Lumenick inthe New York Post. “There are scattered moments” of drama, but only the illogical behavior of the reporter and some “hokey coincidences” carry the story to its final line.