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Reviews provided by RottenTomatoes
Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: Branagh, whose screen career with Shakespeare began on a high note with Henry V and has gone steadily downhill since, does a nice job keeping a stagebound piece relatively cinematic without resorting to the usual opening-up techniques. Read more
Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times: Those who say they wouldn't mind watching Michael Caine and Jude Law recite the phone book may well have their patience tested by Sleuth. Read more
David Edelstein, New York Magazine/Vulture: I think the movie works best if you know the original and have a taste for goofy revisionism -- say, Hamlet as a giant Hawaiian luau with the final duel on surfboards, or Paul Anka doing a finger-snapping "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Read more
J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader: Director Kenneth Branagh has mercifully pared the action down to 88 minutes (the first movie dragged on for 138), but the final act... still seems to go on forever. Read more
Randy Cordova, Arizona Republic: A grand exercise in watching two marvelous actors rip into some crackling dialogue. It's the thespian equivalent of jousting, and it's fascinating to watch. Read more
Ty Burr, Boston Globe: Sleuth gradually becomes soulless and no fun, and what's the point of that? Read more
Carina Chocano, Los Angeles Times: Language this lethal has all but disappeared from the movies, and it's an unmitigated pleasure to observe Caine and Law attack it with such ferocity. Sleuth is nasty fun. Read more
Tom Long, Detroit News: It sounds so promising. It plays so disappointing. Read more
Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: It's like Deathtrap crossed with Cribs as staged by Stanley Kubrick. Read more
Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: We're left with two suitably hammy performances by Caine and Law, who do not forget they are actors playing actors, and a production design that must have kept the lighting people doing some ingenious plotting of their own. Read more
Amy Nicholson, I.E. Weekly: Goofy art house tendencies (including an ill-thought dalliance with homo-eroticism) trigger a few giggles, yet the clever, crisply-acted power struggle seizes your attention Read more
Ella Taylor, L.A. Weekly: Leaving aside two brilliant 1963 film adaptations of [Pinter's] best work, The Caretaker and The Servant, the terse opacity of the dialogue that served his early plays so astringently has never translated well onto the big screen. Read more
Jan Stuart, Newsday: Purely as an exercise in stylistic face-lifting, Sleuth is fascinating. Read more
Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: Kenneth Branagh is not a director with a light touch, or an aversion to self-importance, and the movie's visuals are too painfully obvious. Read more
Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News: So what's it all about? Got me. Read more
Kyle Smith, New York Post: Just when things should be getting exciting and complex, they become repetitive and predictable. Subtext becomes hint becomes statement becomes declaration. For once, Pinter is a little too easy to understand. Read more
Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: It doesnt work, and the reasons why are no mystery, no mystery at all. Read more
Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer: Just terrible. Read more
James Berardinelli, ReelViews: It's an interesting failure -- a film that works more successfully as a study of technique and writing than as a motion picture. Read more
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: In Sleuth what he [Kenneth Branagh] celebrates is perplexing, ominous, insinuating material in the hands of two skilled actors. Read more
Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: It has a certain edge and daring, or more to the point it pretends to. That goes some distance toward concealing that Sleuth is a horrible mismatch of writer and material. Read more
Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle: Shaffer, who adapted the 1972 version himself, surely would be less than thrilled by the post-modern, minimalist interpretation given to his best-known work, and understandably so. Read more
Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: This would have been a memorable night at the theater. Too bad they filmed it. Read more
Globe and Mail: A wickedly entertaining four-man tour de force, Sleuth transforms Anthony Shaffer's Tony-winning, rather than rehashing the fine 1972 movie version. Read more
Peter Howell, Toronto Star: Closed-circuit cameras and electronic gadgets are so much in abundance, bathed in the coldest of blue lights, it's as if Branagh chose to film his Sleuth in a Best Buy warehouse. Read more
Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine: If you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year. Read more
Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: The real culprit, dear Watson, is playwright Harold Pinter, contracted here for a baroque rewrite of Shaffer's original dialogue. The result. Is one. Of unbearable artifice. Throughout. The entire film. Some puzzles just give you a headache. Read more
Trevor Johnston, Time Out: Kenneth Branagh's direction, its self-consciously skewed angles and surveillance-cam cutaways highlighting his weakness for the misplaced flourish, is more of a hindrance than a help. Read more
Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic: This film wants only to entertain, and other talents have gathered with Pinter to help. Read more
Claudia Puig, USA Today: Caine and Law are in fine form bantering cleverly in this entertaining cat-and-mouse game, thanks to the inspired dialogue of Harold Pinter. Read more
Robert Koehler, Variety: This is a radically different Sleuth, one that feels at times like Pinter self-parody. Read more
Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: Little more than a sleek, stylish stunt. Read more