Avaliações do Metacritic

Little Odessa might have been a great film. Instead, it is an exceptionally good one, the kind that suggests the start of a powerful career.

Little Odessa is an extremely complex motion picture, layered with powerful themes and fascinating characters.

The film has a thesis: hitmen must have psychopathy on their CVs; but even bad guys have souls. It's Roth's tough job to illustrate this, which, in his finest performance to date, he does magnificently.

A highly charged, coolly assured directorial bow graced by riveting work from a trio of accomplished leads, Little Odessa immediately etches a firm place on the map for 25-year-old New York newcomer James Gray.

Like something by Tolstoy or Dostoyevski, but -- of course -- on a much smaller, less ambitious scale, it is a work that weighs on your mind long after you leave it.

Gray hasn't filled out the emotional terrain he's surveyed here. He hasn't quite grown into the emotions he wants to put on screen. When he does, he'll come up with something lasting.

It seemed to me that the movie had raised too many serious issues to turn into a visual exercise at the end. It's a set piece when a dramatic scene is needed.

Since the hit-man career is probably one of the most familiar non-law enforcement careers in films, it should come as no surprise that Little Odessa has nothing new to say about it.

Roth, a great actor, is reduced to a walking sneer, and the picture creeps along in a series of handsome but painfully languorous hazy-shade-of-winter tableaux.

It's hard to care about the characters in this defiantly downbeat drama.