Critic Reviews

The smoothness of the movie’s individual sequences bumps up against narrative raggedness, as Affleck labors to compress a sprawling, novel-ready narrative.

There’s enough here for half a dozen movies, and you can feel the severe overcrowding. But you can't keep your eyes off it.

The film’s climax is tautly executed; the way everything plays out is a whirl of brutal, violent beauty.

Live by Night is clearly Affleck’s love letter to classic pulp, and almost no noir touchstone goes unturned in its two-hour-plus run.

It’s a sprawling plot that consistently teeters on the edge of unwieldiness, but Affleck’s assured directing, gorgeous cinematography by Robert Richardson and a who’s-who of Hollywood’s best character actors keep it mostly on track.

While the filmmaker conjures beautiful imagery and a subtle exploration of fathers and their children, the good stuff is too often caught up in a muddle of well-tread crime clichés.

A curiously unfocused Prohibition-era gangster epic with some well-choreographed action scenes, a few provocative plot threads — but an increasingly meandering main story line that goes from intriguing to confounding to preachy to what exactly are we even watching here?

Still, it’s worth seeing for Affleck’s charismatic performance and for its vision of America as a land of greed, violence and political expediency that some moviegoers will find all too familiar.

Centred on an uxorious guy who is building a gambling palace, Live by Night invites unfortunate comparisons with Martin Scorsese’s 1995 classic "Casino," in which the hero is tortured by his dishonest business and his unstable wife. Of course, Affleck isn’t Robert De Niro – delivering what was probably the last great dramatic role of his career – and Chris Messina as Coughlin’s rather bland sidekick most definitely isn’t Joe Pesci.

Live By Night is solid enough entertainment, but it lacks the nasty edge or narrative muscularity to make it memorable.