[Robert De Niro has] made one of the best pictures of the year.
The Good Shepherd (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:161
Fresh:90
Rotten:71
Average Rating:6.1/10
Consensus: This fictitious CIA origin film is an overlong, tedious effort that leaves viewers with more questions than answers.
Rated: 15 [See Full Rating] for some violence, sexuality and language
Runtime: 2 hrs 48 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release:23-02-2007
Synopsis: With THE GOOD SHEPHERD, Robert De Niro (A BRONX TALE) makes an ambitious return to the director's chair. A labor of love for Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (FORREST GUMP), the film tells an... With THE GOOD SHEPHERD, Robert De Niro (A BRONX TALE) makes an ambitious return to the director's chair. A labor of love for Oscar-winning screenwriter Eric Roth (FORREST GUMP), the film tells an epic, fictionalized account of how the Central Intelligence Agency was born. Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, a reserved young man who graduated from Yale in the late 1930s. His membership in the exclusive, hidden Skull and Bones society led him away from poetry and into a relationship with the federal government, who recruited him to help them on several covert operations. Roth's script alternates between Wilson's gradual emergence as a genuine government operative in the early 1940s and the infamous Bay of Pigs conflict in the early 1960s. Along the way, he has a sweet romance with a pretty deaf girl (a sparkling Tammy Blanchard) and ends up marrying the woman he impregnates (Angelina Jolie) out of a strong sense of duty. Throughout the film, the emergence of a mysterious tape haunts Wilson, who is determined to uncover the truth behind a leak in his secret organization. Production designer Jeannine Claudia Oppewall (L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, CATCH ME IF YOU CAN) and costume designer Ann Roth (THE ENGLISH PATIENT, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY) faithfully recreate these earlier periods in American history, while the imagery of Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Richardson (J.F.K., THE AVIATOR) casts a warm, stately glow upon De Niro's assembled cast of luminaries (including Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, William Hurt, Billy Crudup, and Joe Pesci). The result is a production that recalls Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION and Steven Spielberg's MUNICH. [More]
Starring: Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Joe Pesci, John Turturro
Starring: Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Joe Pesci, John Turturro, Keir Dullea, Alec Baldwin, Michael Gambon, Billy Crudup, William Hurt, Liya Kebede, Gabriel Macht, Jason Patric, Eddie Redmayne, Sándor Técsy
Director: Robert De Niro
Director: Robert De Niro
Producer: Jane Rosenthal
Studio: Universal Pictures
Reviews for The Good Shepherd
If Robert De Niro had directed 'Casino Royale,' Bond wouldhave been suitable for Masterpiece Theater. And that's nota compliment.
Daniel Craig rarely stopped flexing as the new James Bond; here Matt Damon hardly moves a muscle.
Robert De Niro made up for lost time by making "The Good Shepherd," a film that feels like it takes 13 years to watch.That's an exaggeration. The sprawling, 160-minute epic only feels like it takes seven hours.
It’s almost impossible to buy Wilson as a pioneer who helped shape one of the world’s most intricate and devious intelligence agencies, leaving us to wonder how the CIA could ever have gotten off the ground through the labors of such an utter stiff.
Clocking in at nearly three hours, The Good Shepherd is a numbing history of the C.I.A. that leaves you Novocained.
The sort of le Carre that even le Carre doesn't write anymore, but without the British accent...a solemn but compulsively fascinating puzzle.
The type of movie that would probably improve with repeat viewings, but God only knows who could sit through this experience twice.
The problem is that De Niro nails a particularly emotionless, chilly, paranoid tone -- and then stubbornly refuses to modulate it for damn near three hours.
It's the story of the season: Trim about a half-hour and you could turn a good movie into a great one.
As long as it is, Shepherd speeds through its leading man's life, cramming in 30 years without elaborating on any of them.
The Good Shepherd is equally fascinating as a character drama and as a cold war thriller.
"The Good Shepherd" is all about tone and the stoic atmosphere of secrets and lies that protects U.S. government agents. It's about a milieu of insidious self-important people in positions of power who took advantage of their autonomy.
Ostensibly the untold story of the birth of the C.I.A., Robert De Niro's film is really the most mundane psychological profile of the year.
Excessive running time (168 minutes) and deliberate pace are not the problem of De Niro's ambitious saga--it's the lack of a proper dramatic paradigm to illustrate vividly what often comes across as history lecture, though the facts are fascinating.
A buttoned-up, shadowy dramatic recounting of the early days of the buttoned-up, shadowy Central Intelligence Agency.
Latest News for The Good Shepherd
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