Critic consensus:What makes Dan Brown's novel a best seller is evidently not present in this dull and bloated movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code.

Numbered reviews:1. Some protesters believe that if you see this film, you'll go to Hell. They got it backwards. I think if you go to Hell, you'll probably see this film while you're there.
2. Over the course of two and one-half hours, the film unfolds in a series of dull and unengaging episodes.
3. The movie version is so faithful to Dan Brown's hit book it should come with a dust jacket ...
4. If you want a taut adventure story, read the book. If you want a simiplistic tale with average performances and irritating alterations to the source material, watch the movie.
5. If you want an entertaining yarn about the Knights Templar, historical secrets, and cryptic codes hidden in famous documents and artifacts, go rent National Treasure.
6. Does what a good film adaptation should do: Illustrate the best parts of its source material and still manage to make a highly enjoyable film for the uninitiated.
7. Even as a visual aid, The Da Vinci Code is a deep-dyed disappointment. Paris by night never looked murkier.
8. It still had the necessary element of Encyclopedia Brown cerebellus-ex-machina, but it was visually interesting and didn't slow down the action with book-digging%u2026they made the film well, they just took the path of least resistance, and for that I can
9. It would have taken a more imaginative approach and vision not within the reach of Howard and Goldsman to make the material come alive as a movie.
10. Completing the trail of cryptic clues simply becomes an end in and of itself -- think Sudoku: The Movie -- with little in the way of whimsy, star chemistry or excitement to enliven the dour plod.


Critic consensus:A simple-minded but visually exciting experience, full of blood, violence, and ready-made movie quotes.

Numbered reviews:1. If it's comic books you want, you'll love this look at Spartans versus Persians. Even better in IMAX, but don't expect much story to go along with the sound and fury.
2. The movie swings back and forth from awesome to awful so regularly and rapidly that it's like a jai alai match.
3. If the movie's neocon message is as thin as a politician's excuse, that's to be expected. But what's surprising here is that the sights are just as meagre.
4. The picture achieves a heightened, painterly quality in its imagery. Also artistic is the fight choreography, where assured control of slow motion and other speed effects achieve a balletic rhythm in battle.
5. As to this pumped-up spectacle's other aims, it's anybody's guess: selling gladiatorial chest-beating as beefcake erotica? Combining a movie and its own video-game spin-off into one package? Being both a dessert topping and a floor wax?
6. 300 explodes off the screen in IMAX. It is the only way to see this epic picture.
7. That brings us back to the battle sequences and the visuals, and let me tell you, they are everything you are expecting and more.
8. The kids just want to have fun. Many of them will. But what does that say about another Greek contribution -- Western civilization?
9. I feel comfortable enough in my masculinity to say that if I had to stand in the presence of these men for more than ten seconds, I'd spontaneously grow a pair of ovaries.
10. To hell with historical accuracy. What's required, but lacking, is the invocation of a butt-kicking right to continuously top itself. Artful decapitations, but a too-serious head on its shoulders.


Critic consensus:Melville is at the top of his game, giving us his next-to-last entry into the world of deception, crime, and extreme suspense that made him a maestro of the French heist genre.

Numbered reviews:
1. The dialogue is spare, spans of silence run for minutes, the tense atmosphere is punctuated by unexpected eruptions of violence, and the film does not end happily for anyone.
2. If you ever wanted to know how to look good wearing a trenchcoat, lighting a cigarette, handling a revolver, drinking a whiskey or overpowering an armed guard, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 gangster drama is your guide.
3. Holds its own with other movies of its type.
4. Henri Decae's (1915-1987) marvelously precise cinematography, inspiringly attuned to Melville's tragic vision of the lives and deaths of the most stoical criminals in the noir genre, is alone worth the price of admission.
5. This is a transitional film that makes way for a 'New Wave' of crime films soon to follow.
6. Le Cercle Rouge offers the kind of experience that makes you glad movies exist.
7. Apesar de jamais permitir que seus personagens falem muita coisa, Melville leva o espectador a conhecЖ-los atravжs de suas aушes, interaушes e olhares.
8. It's a languorous and uncompromising work that will drive some to distraction, but also a movie of dark, still beauty that will have others weeping tears of pure, noir joy.
9. Melville remained, in all his work and particularly his policiers, a classicist of calamity, a master of transforming the chaos of criminality into a form as refined as a sonnet or a minuet.
10. An exercise in ultimate-cool where men follow a code of honor to wherever it might lead them.