Richard Jewell

[Eastwood] has crafted a gripping thriller that places the blame for one man’s ruin squarely at the feet of those more powerful.

From one angle the movie is pure right-wing populism, standing up for white, working-class, salt-of-the-earth guys who simply want to serve and protect. But another moral could be drawn: quite literally, Richard is a victim of racial profiling, no less than a Middle Eastern immigrant to the US might be.

For a film about the efforts to clear one man's name, the treatment of Scruggs in Richard Jewell seems like hypocrisy – with a side-order of misogyny – of the worst sort. It's a massive blight on an otherwise very competently told and engrossing story.

Eastwood delivers a riveting take on this true tale of a security guard who was declared a hero for finding a bomb and then became the prime suspect . Paul Walter Hauser is perfection as Richard, as is the great Kathy Bates as his loyal mother.

Resurrecting his sturdy cinematic prose after recent fiascos like The 15:17 to Paris, Eastwood competently dramatizes the underdog's true tale with a patient, straightforward style akin to Sully and Changeling, but he falls short on nuance.

This is a morality tale - in a good way, mostly - about the vulnerability of the individual citizen in the face of state power and about the fate of a private person menaced by the machinery of publicity.

The story is compelling -- from hero to reviled heel in no time flat. In a jauntier time it might have been raw material for social satire; in our day it's a cautionary tale about abuse of power by the press and government alike.

Jewell, to its credit, is anchored by one of the more complex heroes in Eastwood's canon. But I'm still not certain it finds the most cutting or convincing path through this story.

Solid, dependable, very late period Eastwood.

A timely story of broken trust in institutions.

Richard Jewell is pointed and compelling - so much so that it needn't underline its themes as thickly as it does.

...ultra-watchable, engrossing, naturalistic, tautly directed and superbly acted - especially by Hauser and Rockwell - and scripted.

In many ways, it is a very good story, efficiently told - and that's down to the excellent and very plausible performance from Paul Walter Hauser.

It's not Eastwood's finest hour.

Eastwood's plain style tends to be his greatest asset, because the stories at his films' centers are often wild enough to tell themselves. That's certainly the case here.

"Richard Jewell" benefits from a muted wistfulness, which manages to convey the injustice of what occurred without overselling the theatrics.

A good story is a good story, and Eastwood knows how to tell a good story.

Another fine Eastwood film about a man with greatness thrust upon him.