Critic Reviews
87
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
positive
17(94%)
mixed
1(6%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 18 Critic Reviews
100
Reed's take on the material is innovative, letting realism blur into an anaemic, soul-searching delirium.
100
Suspense gives way to metaphor in a stark thriller that hints at the work to come from master Carol Reed.
100
Mason gives a grand performance, his voice racked with desperation and pain yet sonorous.
100
Reed, one of Britain's finest directors, made his name with this haunting, lyrical masterpiece about a doomed fugitive.
100
Carol Reed's Odd Man Out is the rare movie classic that grows more relevant and compelling with every passing year. [29 Dec 2006, p.5C]
100
Odd Man Out is the extraordinary thriller about a botched IRA bank robbery and the badly wounded and increasingly feverish rebel, Johnny (James Mason), who wanders Belfast with both his mates and the police on his trail. [29 Feb 2008, p.C8]
90
Though he has little coherent dialogue after a certain point, Mason is ideal as the embodiment of unsteadiness, physical and moral.
88
This may be Reed’s most pretentious film, but it also happens to be one of his very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that’s within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez’s work with Orson Welles).
88
Odd Man Out is indeed a character study wrapped in the guise of a sociopolitical thriller, and a work which accordingly plays better when accentuating the moral and personal complexities of the former through the aesthetic prism of the latter, shedding the weight of topical investment even as the shadows of its influence hang literally and figuratively on the film’s dramatic landscape.
80
A most intriguing film.
