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All the King's Men

2006

Steven Zaillian

Sean Penn, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson ...

5.9

3,871

Drama Remake. Based on the Robert Penn Warren novel. The life of populist Southerner Willie Stark, a political creature loosely based on Governor Huey Long of Louisiana. Steven Zaillian's update features Sean Penn and Patricia Clarkson in the roles of a corrupt Southern politico and his long-suffering mistress.

	Author	Review
United States	A. O. Scott The New York Times	"Nothing in the picture works. It is both overwrought and tedious, its complicated narrative bogging down in lyrical voiceover, long flashbacks and endless expository conversations between people speaking radically incompatible accents."	NEG
United States	Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times	"[Zaillian] has given us an intricate, subtly rewarding narrative whose uncompromising nature and undeniable moral seriousness make it far from business as usual"	POS
United States	Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"Overthought, overwrought and thuddingly underwhelming, this high-profile misfire makes a congealed gumbo out of Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-winning 1946 novel and the Oscar-winning 1949 movie that followed it, sinking a classy cast in the goo (…) Rating: ★½ (out of 4)"	NEG
United Kingdom	Philip French The Guardian	"Zaillian's biggest mistake has been to update the setting to the late Forties and early Fifties (...) The second mistake is the peevish, smirking performance of Sean Penn"	NEG
United States	Noel Murray AV Club	"The movie's more damnable problem is its irrelevance (...) [The director] has made a movie about monsters, not men, and in 2006, it's the men we most need to fear."	NEG
United Kingdom	Stella Papamichael BBC	"There is no real sense of anything at stake (...) It's a typical politician's tale - all talk and no action (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	Ty Burr Boston Globe	"It doesn't have anything urgent or even interesting to say."	NEG
United States	Dana Stevens Slate	"It’s Zaillian’s overdirection that cooks this whole mess into a flavorless gumbo"	NEG

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