Find Me Guilty: Critic Reviews

As Vin Diesel plays him in a likable, image-adjusting turn -- prosthetically fat, thick of Jersey accent -- Jackie (who died in 2004) was about as sweet as a career criminal can be.

Find Me Guilty, Mr. Lumet's first feature film in seven years, catches him near the top of his game.

Sitting through the belabored courtroom drama Find Me Guilty feels like a particularly prolonged session of jury duty.

Diesel infuses the Lucchese family made man with a convincing cocktail of sweetness and rage.

Starting in 1987, the Lucchese trial crawled on for a historic 21 months, and the movie feels like it lasts twice that long.

Find Me Guilty is overlong and often sitcomy, but it's also pleasantly old-school, with a tone, soundtrack, and even a title-card font that suggest a mellow but not senile Woody Allen.

It's one thing to project sympathetic qualities onto fictional gangsters like the Corleones and the Sopranos; it's another to make protagonists out of actual members of the Lucchese crime family.

To the charge of squandering credibility despite being based on a true case: guilty.

Although Find Me Guilty presents Mr. Lumet and company in top form, the film does not belong in the top tier of the director's work. But in important moments, it touches that tier, and for that audiences will be grateful.

Slow, repetitive, flat and altogether wrongheaded, using suspect editing of a true story to make us celebrate a bunch of vicious crooks.

This movie by its nature is not thrilling, but it is very genuinely interesting, and that is rare.

Minor but well-crafted.

This may be the most Brechtian thing Lumet has ever done -- a movie that repeatedly challenges us to think and then to reconsider.

For all its ripped-from- the-headlines verisimilitude, Find Me Guilty sometimes feels like it should have been called Find Me My Cousin Vinny.

As the case grinds on and we follow Jackie from his cramped cell to the airless courtroom we begin to feel as confined as the prisoner himself.

Diesel isn't amusing, so he merely comes off as a showy actor in a bad wig.

[Lumet's] crowning masterpiece.

Excellent, polished, meticulously researched and entirely galvanizing.

Character-rich pic plays like vintage Lumet, mining the grim comedy from life-and-death legal wranglings in the manner of Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City and The Verdict.

Belongs to the odd couple of Dinklage and Diesel, whose volatile performance finally proves he is much more than an action star.

It's hard to do anything in court that hasn't been done before. It's a static situation, and points are scored in tiny increments. No big witness-stand breakdowns, no tearful confessions. Thus, boredom creeps in.

Not the best work Lumet has done, but it's worthwhile viewing for anyone who likes gangsters, courtrooms, and what happens when the two are brought together.

A film guilty off moral stupidity and misguided hero worship.

Except for a scene with the electrifying Annabella Sciorra as Jackie's ex-wife, Diesel cuts up when he should cut deep.

If watching a jury disregard mountains of damning evidence in favor of a charismatic gangster who calls himself a "gagster" seems a morally challenging proposition, well that's all part of the bargain in Lumet's topical drama.