BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Kamila Bell This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

adonis98-743-186503 The tumultuous early history of the Central Intelligence Agency is viewed through the prism of one man's life. My biggest problem with The Good Shepherd is definitely the outrageous 167 minutes and the pacing was so slow and boring plus seeing Matt Damon dressed as a woman and singing gave me nightmares and even tho the cast is fantastic and talented such as Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, Alec Baldwin, Billy Crudup, Robert De Niro and William Hurt are all of them fantastic actors but their characters were just very one note and pretty lame and it's a real shame and De Niro himself should probably start making great movies again instead of things like this. (5/10)

n-mo 'The Good Shepherd' is at its best when it sticks to nuts-and-bolts cinematic fundamentals: good acting, good shots, engrossing characters, engaging story lines. It is at its worst when it descends into "evolutive" political moralizing: the Cold War was a crack, the Soviets were never a menace, all the U.S. wanted was to keep up its military-industrial complex, the WASP was desperate to keep the Irish Catholic and the Jew out of the rungs of power, etc. etc..All the same, the film manages to pay tribute both to American history and sociology as well as to the greatness of American cinema. Taking care to show a good cross-section of the post-war U.S. society, the film manages a good send-up of the worst of Old Yankee Puritan society in chronicling the devastating effects of hard-line, Manichean detachment on life. Matt Damon's character is appropriately cold and dehumanized, unable to respond to his dutiful and perceptive ("Bonesmen first; God second") wife, played brilliantly by Angelina Jolie. The melodramatic music recounts to great effect the banal but lovable blockbusters of the 1990s, before giving way to the chilling silence of the rude awakening along the path to sophistication.Overall a carefully if a bit too cynically crafted work. It does make for an excellent diversion on an evening when one is feeling nostalgic for times past long before one was in fact born. I certainly enjoyed it on a solitary holiday in NYC on 31 December 2006.

que1169 'What do you people have?''The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.' --Best dialog of the movie! I liked this film more than the average reviewer for the simple reason that, as a history buff, I was at least acquainted with a good deal of the lore of those times and the CIA (JFK & Bay of Pigs, post-war Germany, even CIA drug use for interrogation purposes). And this really is rather essential to a fuller enjoyment of the movie, as I suspect why there was a good deal of ambivalence for it from others. De Niro did a credible job directing, but it was obviously assumed that viewers would have more knowledge of those times than most people probably do, due to the fact that the film did have a tendency to skim over some of the events and minutiae that likely could have used further elucidation. Of course, at well over 2-hours in length, this would not have been practical.The cast was great... with one exception. Damon did a convincing job of playing a soulless bureaucrat, I'll take that any day. While, the one exception, was Angelina Jolie- who I feel was miscast in her role as Damon's estranged wife. She typically is miscast in anything outside of flash and dash type of flix. But that's a somewhat off-topic matter.

Johan Dondokambey The story uses back and forth story flow very nicely in building the background story completely and at the same time focus on the issue at hand. The espionage details are depicted and presented very nicely through the extensive help from the camera angles and zoom plays. I must say I was amazed to see so many big names performing greatly in this movie. Matt Damon performs greatly here, going out of the Bourne espionage character that made him famous, into one that is non operative yet still demands at least the same attention to detail. Angelina Jolie managed to pull out the balancing side for the story. Michael Gambon and Alec Baldwin also did well in filling in the shoes of those characters that don't take much duration.