"It's tempting to call the new Sleuth a soulless remake, but that would imply that the original had a soul," writes Fernando F Croce at Slant. "What keeps the film's motor running is the interplay between the two actors. [Jude] Law has the opaque agility of a cunning scam artist, but it's [Michael] Caine's look of bemused wryness (the way he sizes up his younger co-star as if to say, 'I were you once, kid') that almost makes one believe there's something remotely human at stake in the picture's vacant ingenuity."

"[Anthony] Shaffer's play had a political context that, however crude, gave it some urgency," writes David Edelstein in New York. "At the height of the counterculture, he was trying to expose the snobbish, reactionary, patriarchal bigotry and xenophobia at the heart of the drawing-room English whodunit. [Director Kenneth] Branagh and [screenwriter Harold] Pinter don't have any larger purpose."

Updated through 10/13. Posted by: dwhudson    Source

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