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Live By Night

2016

Ben Affleck

Ben Affleck, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina, Zoe Saldana ...

5.7

5,768

Film noir. Drama Joe Coughlin (Ben Affleck), the son of a Boston police lieutenant, moves to Florida during the Prohibition era to become a bootlegger. As his operation grows, Coughlin faces off against local gangsters, Klansmen, and religious evangelicals while he fights for control of Tampa's criminal underworld.

	Media	Author	Review
		David Rooney The Hollywood Reporter	"Live by Night is solid enough entertainment, but it lacks the nasty edge or narrative muscularity to make it memorable"
		Owen Gleiberman Variety	Ben Affleck's fourth film as a director has many of the virtues of his others, yet this Prohibition crime saga doesn't zing (...) It’s like seeing the ghost of a terrific movie"
		Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly	"'Live by Night' is clearly Affleck’s love letter to classic pulp (...) It also plays the hard-boiled game so faithfully that the genre’s guns-and-dolls tropes hardly get dusted"
		Alonso Duralde The Wrap	"Ben Affleck Presents the Boring Twenties (...) The actor-writer-director’s homage to vintage gangster movies isn’t a complete failure but it’s an offer you can refus."
		Eric Kohn IndieWire	"'Live By Night,' (...) plays like an animatronic gangster movie, with lots of pretty pieces you’ve seen before and nothing particularly engaging about them"
		Stephen Whitty New York Daily News	"A gangster movie without a killer instinct, 'Live by Night' looks resplendent in its period costumes and moody decor. But writer-director-star Ben Affleck never burrows into the genre's knotty moral complexity"
		Sara Stewart New York Post	"It's difficult to avoid sizing up 'Live by Night' as 'The Town' with a classier wardrobe but less heart (...) Rating: ★★½ (out of four)"
		Peter Travers Rolling Stone	"Affleck shines as a director of actors and action. The man knows how to create a haunting gangster noir worth getting lost in. (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of four)"
		Manohla Dargis The New York Times	"'Live by Night' is a messy, unfocused movie about ambition, lost ideals, corrupt men and a thief whose idea of life on his own terms means pulling the trigger."

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