Public Enemies Pretty, if Rote

Critics mostly like Public Enemies, Michael Mann’s lusciously shot—if not terribly deep—ode to ‘30s gangster life with Johnny Depp as bank robber John Dillinger.

• The film is a "beautiful work of art," declares Manohla Dargis for the New York Times, "a vividly realistic portrait of a country deep in depression and jumping with bad men, which looks and plays like no other American gangster film."

• Likewise, David Denby finds Enemies to be "a ravishing dream of violent gangster life in the thirties," though "emotionally neutered," he writes for the New Yorker.
• But Keith Phipps of the Onion AV Club finds it rote: "Depp goes about the business of not getting caught; Bale goes about the business of catching him. Mann reduces a legendary game of cat-and-mouse to a standard police procedural."

(More Johnny Depp stories.)