Roger Ebert named "Owning Mahowny" one of the top ten films of 2003, and assessed Hoffman's performance as "a masterpiece of discipline and precision", calling him a "fearless poet of implosion, plays the role with a fierce integrity, never sending out signals for our sympathy because he knows that Mahowny is oblivious to our presence." However, some critics believed that in his self-effacing performance, Hoffman refused to conform to expectations of a typical movie character and that the movie suffered as a result. Stephanie Zacharek considered him to be a "character who squirms right out of our grasp", and despite being the movie's anchor, he's "such a vaporous one, he leaves "us" feeling adrift".