Directed by Clint Eastwood
(R)
**
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
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Latest Videos FromThe Week
Clint Eastwood’s ambitious biopic “provokes a host of assorted reactions,” said Todd McCarthy in The Hollywood Reporter. Among the strongest: a “simultaneous fascination and revulsion” with its subject, longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The admirably restrained screenplay, from writer Dustin Lance Black (Milk), hopscotches through Hoover’s 48-year tenure as he builds the agency, solves crimes, and amasses files on other people’s private lives while possibly stifling his own homosexuality. “Too bad” J. Edgar is so “turgid, so rich in bad lines and worse readings,” said David Edelstein in New York. The marriage of Eastwood’s plain style and his apparent belief that our government’s most intrusive practices are “rooted in a closeted gay man’s terror of being exposed” results in a film that’s almost a “biopic parody.” Leonardo DiCaprio gives the lead role his all, demonstrating “a remarkable ability to play the character” at every point across five decades, said Peter Debruge in Variety. But the actor’s “innate kindliness” becomes a problem too: Watching a reasonably likable Hoover feels “at odds with reality.”
