Eastern Promises: Critic Reviews

A thriller can lead us into the fascinating intricacy of a criminal subculture, and Eastern Promises does that with the globalized Russian Mob.

A movie whose images and implications are likely to stay in your head for a long time.

There are interesting scenes, moments, ideas: but Eastern Promises does not have the sinew and boldness of Cronenberg's best work.

If you don't mind bloodshed and are drawn to taut thrillers with fascinating characters portrayed skillfully, Eastern Promises is just the ticket.

Eastern Promises, a chilly character thriller set in the Russian underworld of London, has elements of murder mystery and gangster melodrama. But in director David Cronenberg's hands, it's a search for moral bearing in a dark and desperate world.

In Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg's hellacious new Russian mob movie, Viggo Mortensen finally comes of age as an actor and a movie star.

I've said it before and hope to again: David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation.

Eastern Promises is the first must-see adult film of the young fall.

What it's really about, more than sensitivity for displaced people or social analyses, is violence -- hideous, gruesome, over-the-top violence.

The film's genius performance belongs to the venerable Armin Mueller-Stahl, who plays the family head with a twinkling eye and an air of avuncular, Old World charm.

...Eastern Promises is as honorable an entertainment as it is a humbling work of art.

Eastern Promises is finally conventional, even sentimental.

You walk out of Eastern Promises feeling spooked and sullied, as if waking from a noisome dream. "London is to blame," one of the characters declares, but I don't buy it. I blame David Cronenberg.

A film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature.

David Cronenberg's follow-up to A History of Violence lacks the theoretical dimension of its predecessor, but it's no less masterful in its fluid storytelling and shocking choreography of violence.

Mortensen delivers yet another startling performance, stunning in its intensity and cunning in its ambiguity.

It's a mouthful of blood with a vodka chaser.

...manages to blend the clashing of cultures, family resentment, ugly heritage and the unlikely promise of new life without going in circles.

Suffice it to say it's a bit of primal brutality that lays bare the animal in each of us, fighting to survive.

I cannot easily recommend these delights to everyone, but my high regard for Mr. Cronenberg's stylistic virtues remains largely undiminished.

Eastern Promises instantly takes its place among David Cronenberg's very best films.

[Viggo Mortensen] lends a moral complexity to Eastern Promises that makes it much more than just a very accomplished action thriller.

It's just too bad Eastern Promises, on the whole, promises more than it delivers.

Menacingly brilliant.

Sure, it's just a crime thriller, yet a genre flick by Cronenberg is always a different sort of beast.