State of Play: Critic Reviews

[An] excitingly twisty and topical new politics-and-media conspiracy thriller.

The chance to explore the swiftly changing culture of Web-age journalism is one of several intriguing possibilities that State of Play squanders.

State of Play rattles along very satisfactorily, and Crowe brings to the role a relaxed self-possession and even charm.

Though it is a well-crafted political thriller, State of Play may actually have more to say about the beleaguered state of print journalism than about governmental shenanigans.

Based on a hit BBC miniseries, State of Play features a handsome production and terrific performances from its aforementioned stars.

It's a pleasure watching this cast make the most of the material.

An effectively involving journalism-cum-conspiracy yarn with a bang-bang opening and a frantic closer.

It's Bateman who adds juice just as too many conspiracies threaten to spoil the stew. His cameo as a hustling scuzzball is the film's most memorable performance.

It's a film in a hurry. In the scant minutes between plot twists, we get treated to bite-size nuggets of character development and a few juicy nibbles of acting from a cast almost universally committed to going large.

The movie doesn't quite work, but even when it's misfiring it has an old-fashioned appeal.

This conspiracy thriller, starring Russell Crowe as an investigative newspaper reporter and Helen Mirren as his fire/ice editor, comes at us like the proverbial bat out of hell and keeps up a brisk rhythm built for intelligence.

It's like a time bomb that's never dismantled but never explodes. The movie is good enough that the ending leaves you ... not angry, exactly. Unfulfilled.

The three screenwriters may have been trying to work too many plot strands into two hours; in any case, State of Play is both overstuffed and inconclusive.

A smart, ingenious thriller set in the halls of Congress and the city room of a newspaper not unlike the Washington Post.

The kind of acting Crowe does here won't win awards and doesn't scream for attention. Yet it serves the thriller conventions as well as the old-warrior-journalist cliches in style.

This rote paranoid thriller was adapted from a 2003 BBC miniseries, with a few topical headlines folded in and some cursory attempts to make newspapers seem au courant.

The journalist in me loved State of Play. The moviegoer in me even more so.

A solidly constructed thriller that recalls the paranoid conspiracies of the 1970s.

State of Play makes you wonder where we'll be in a decade; more importantly, it makes you wonder where we are now.

State of Play, based on the outstanding British television series, is a first-rate political thriller, but it's also something more.

State of Play is the latest incoherently written, mass-entertainment gibberish by the overrated Tony Gilroy.

It is Mr. Crowe who lends State of Play a sense of perpetual urgency as he traverses the corridors of power in search of massive wrongdoing at the risk of his own life.

This efficient, admirably coherent thriller about reporters digging down to where politics and murder meet in Washington, D.C., has a wistful air about it as regards the fourth estate at a time when the profession is dangling by a thread.

State of Play is bordered by the states of absurdity and cliche.

As dense as a Watergate era newspaper and as immediate as a blog, State of Play is an absolutely riveting state-of-the-art "big conspiracy" thriller.