Metacritic reviews

While Worth is most literally concerned with a stupefying question — what is a life worth? — it’s more precisely about the price of calculating such a wrenching ask.

It’s all so human and messy and it’s refreshing to see a director that doesn’t shy away from such complexity with Colangelo crafting a film that’s every bit as nuanced as the subject at hand.

By humanizing the events of such a huge tragedy, Sara Colangelo shines a light on both the victims and the forgotten bystanders who were left behind, opening that closed-off compartment once more and bringing those folks back to the forefront.

There are enough diverse personalities in this unexpected film to generate a degree of interest in a subject few have probably ever thought about.

Colangelo grapples with all that is unfixed in this story with wise consideration. Worth finds its ultimate value in accepting what the film, and we, cannot ever determine for certain.

Proficiently directed by Sara Colangelo (The Kindergarten Teacher), well-acted by Keaton and co-star Amy Ryan as Feinberg’s deputy Camille Biros, and made with the respect and reverence that its subject deserves, Worth nevertheless remains a bit too stolid and too on-the-nose.

Though this stolid drama, based on a true case, begins as a procedural, about systems, processes and deadlines, it is most absorbing when it zeroes in on one man’s moral arc.

Colangelo is a strong director of actors, but Borenstein’s script lets her down a bit.

At almost two-hours Worth somehow feels almost twice as long. Granted, we understand it’s a cliché to describe a film in such terms, but Colangelo and Borenstein are trying to cover too much ground that is, for lack of a better word, repetitive.

Though Feinberg is a singular figure in modern American history (few else could, or would, do his job), Worth hammers his story into a standard biopic template — Grinch Finds Heart — as though one man discovering empathy is truly priceless.