Infamous (2006) Critic Reviews

Less a parable of literary ethics than a showcase of literary personality, and it is in the end more touching than troubling.Read the full review

It's a stellar cast, but you can't help but lament the bad timing.Read the full review

Writer-director Douglas McGrath's boldest stroke is to impose a more overtly gay interpretation on a central relationship in which the attraction was generally supposed to be unspoken.Read the full review

"Capote" is the more intellectual of the two films; Infamous is the more emotional. They exist to complement, not eclipse, one another.Read the full review

The film benefits from three splendid performances: Toby Jones as Capote, an aggressively gay elf exuding a tosspot charm; Sandra Bullock as Nelle Harper Lee, a novelist who uses spoken words with quiet precision, and Daniel Craig as Perry, a deluded monster who is nonetheless forthright and strong.Read the full review

The problem is that the first half of Infamous is nowhere near as comic as McGrath intends. Instead the picture gives off a tone of arch stylization that plays as artificial, overwrought and off-putting.Read the full review

Infamous gives you the unique opportunity to see how two sets of filmmakers can take exactly the same story, make extremely tough though different choices in emphasis and tone and achieve brilliant movies.Read the full review

The added value that writer-director Douglas McGrath has in mind is gossip -- and a goggly interest in gossip becomes the glittering gimmick of Infamous.Read the full review

Watch Infamous on its own. It's a worthy film in its own right, with its own virtues.Read the full review