Capone

"Maybe what's most frustrating is how much the movie's deeper themes — morality, mortality, the twilight of power — churn intriguingly at the edges of nearly every scene only to turn toward sentiment, or become merely secondary to its relentless focus on his physical decline."

"This hollow if perversely watchable exercise in self-annihilation builds to a violent finale that finally makes good on the biopic’s sordid potential, as Trank shoots his way out of oblivion with a sequence in which Capone does the same."

"This is primarily a head movie that unfolds in the sepulchral chambers of Capone's addled skull with a heavy load of woozy Lynchian weirdness and a dash of Kubrick's The Shining."

"Hardy’s performance is starkly unsentimental, yet part of its fetishized authenticity is that Capone never has anything too interesting to say."

"Aside from Hardy’s full-on commitment, Capone seems too dramatically dull and laborious to support its ambition as a subversive biopic or a deeply personal take on public vilification."

"One might naturally think of The Irishman and its own depiction of time catching up to a fixture of organized crime. But Capone almost plays like a rebuttal to those who insisted Scorsese’s film was too damn long: There’s less power to seeing the pathetic final stretch of a life without the context of everything that came before."

"It’s an interesting film, which Trank tops off with a contrived finale of bizarre, spectacular (and contrived) violence, yet the woozy slipping-into-dementia-fantasy sequences, although striking, mean sometimes that the visual impact of what we are seeing is sometimes lessened, as we wait to see if it is really happening or not."

"Sometimes the effect is akin to watching a late-period Brando performance where you’re not sure who he’s talking to even when he’s addressing another character directly."