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34
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65
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37
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33
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93
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64
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36
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49
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54
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93
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82
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79
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78
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76
Shine a Light
73
Kung Fu Panda
71
Horton Hears a Who!
69
Redbelt
67
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
65
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
64
Wanted
62
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The
61
Stop Loss
61
Incredible Hulk, The
58
Mist, The
57
Forbidden Kingdom, The
57
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
57
Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D
55
Street Kings
55
Nim's Island
55
Baby Mama
54
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
54
Get Smart
53
Sex and the City: The Movie
51
Mamma Mia!
50
Step Brothers
49
Hancock
49
X-Files: I Want to Believe, The
48
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
47
Strangers, The
44
Ruins, The
43
Meet Dave
41
Drillbit Taylor
37
Made of Honor
37
Shutter
37
Speed Racer
36
Space Chimps
36
College Road Trip
36
What Happens in Vegas...
35
Jumper
34
Happening, The
34
10,000 B.C.
33
Superhero Movie
31
Deception
24
Love Guru, The
22
Postal
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.

83
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61
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80
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76
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47
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80
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60
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72
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55
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61
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64
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63
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xx
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70
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49
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83
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83
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78
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54
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75
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48
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54
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47
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64
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74
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85
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28
Eight Miles High
54
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81
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62
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64
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59
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86
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60
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72
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47
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31
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55
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69
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73
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36
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76
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68
Praying with Lior
72
Priceless
51
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Red Roses and Petrol
79
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78
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70
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61
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72
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81
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71
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72
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64
XXY
67
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75
Young@Heart
86
Up the Yangtze
86
Flight of the Red Balloon, The
85
Edge of Heaven, The
84
My Winnipeg
83
Chop Shop
83
Paranoid Park
83
Alexandra
83
Chris & Don. A Love Story
83
U2 3D
82
Man on Wire
81
Tell No One
81
Encounters at the End of the World
80
Bigger, Stronger, Faster*
80
Band's Visit, The
80
Last Mistress, The
79
Reprise
79
Visitor, The
79
Before I Forget
78
Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
78
Counterfeiters, The
76
Order of Myths, The
76
Shotgun Stories
76
Beauty in Trouble
75
Young@Heart
75
Days and Clouds
74
Mongol
74
Duchess of Langeais, The
73
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
72
Lou Reed's Berlin
72
Woman on the Beach
72
Boy A
72
Full Battle Rattle
72
Priceless
72
Surfwise
71
Tuya's Marriage
71
To the Limit
71
My Brother Is an Only Child
71
Trumbo
71
Roman de gare
70
Transsiberian
70
Standard Operating Procedure
70
Love Songs
70
Outsourced
70
Caramel
69
Go-Getter, The
69
Operation Filmmaker
68
Heartbeat Detector
68
Honeydripper
68
Praying with Lior
67
Year My Parents Went on Vacation, The
67
Alice's House
67
Mad Detective
66
Son of Rambow
66
Jellyfish
66
Man Named Pearl, A
66
When Did You Last See Your Father?
65
American Teen
65
Water Lilies
64
Married Life
64
Dreams with Sharp Teeth
64
XXY
64
Fall, The
64
Brideshead Revisited
63
Bustin' Down the Door
63
Foot Fist Way, The
63
Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
62
Expired
62
Kiss the Bride
61
Brick Lane
61
Stuck
61
Kabluey
61
OSS 117: Cairo - Nest of Spies
61
Baghead
61
On the Rumba River
61
Wackness, The
60
Fugitive Pieces
60
Blind Mountain
59
Gunnin for that #1 Spot
59
Very British Gangster, A
59
Felon
58
Jihad for Love, A
57
Flawless
57
Stone Angel, The
56
Then She Found Me
56
Sangre de mi sangre
55
Quid Pro Quo
55
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
55
Irina Palm
55
Unknown Woman
55
Bra Boys
55
Without the King
54
Diminished Capacity
54
Tracey Fragments, The
54
Elsa & Fred
54
CSNY: Déjà Vu
53
Mister Lonely
52
Mother of Tears, The
52
My Blueberry Nights
51
Finding Amanda
51
Promotion, The
51
Savage Grace
49
Children of Huang Shi, The
48
Death Defying Acts
47
Doorman, The
47
Bella
47
Full Grown Men
44
No Regret
39
August
38
Life Before Her Eyes, The
37
War, Inc.
36
Holding Trevor
33
Miss Conception
31
Garden Party
30
Meet Bill
29
Red Roses and Petrol
28
Eight Miles High
25
Take
10
Harold
xx
Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic
xx
Two Tickets to Paradise
xx
Canary
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
|
Street Kings
Fox Searchlight Pictures
 |
|
MPAA RATING: R for strong violence and pervasive language
Starring
Keanu Reeves,
Forest Whitaker,
Hugh Laurie,
Terry Crews,
Chris Evans,
Cedric the Entertainer,
Common,
and
The Game
In Street Kings, a police thriller directed by David Ayer, Keanu Reeves plays Tom Ludlow, a veteran LAPD Vice detective. Ludlow sets out on a quest to discover the killers of his former partner, Detective Terrance Washington. Academy Award winner Forest Whitaker plays Captain Wander, Ludlow's supervisor, whose duties include keeping him within the confines of the law and out of the clutches of Internal Affairs Captain Biggs (Hugh Laurie). Ludlow teams up with a young Robbery-Homicide detective (Chris Evans) to track Washington's killers through the diverse communities of Los Angeles. Their determination pays off when the two detectives track down Washington's murderers and confront them in an attempt to bring them to justice. (Fox Searchlight)
| GENRE(S): |
Crime
|
Drama
|
Suspense/Thriller
|
| WRITTEN BY: |
James Ellroy
David Ayer
|
| DIRECTED BY: |
David Ayer
|
| RELEASE DATE: |
Theatrical: April 11, 2008
|
| RUNNING TIME: |
109 minutes, Color |
| ORIGIN: |
USA |

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
80
The Hollywood Reporter
Kirk Honeycutt
"Kings" covers familiar territory but does so with ruthless efficiency, intense performances and a densely packed plot designed to highlight the moral issues that most concern Ayer and Ellroy.

80
Variety
Peter Debruge
A brutal look at police corruption that allows director David Ayer and "L.A. Confidential" author James Ellroy to pool their deeply cynical insights.

80
New York Daily News
Joe Neumaier
After its clichéd first scene - a solo LAPD officer battling a well-armed gang of thugs - Street Kings becomes an enjoyably tough, blood-splattered action drama that revolves around the one good cop at its center.

75
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
There's a lot to appreciate in Street Kings, a tight, propulsive action thriller, but there's one thing to marvel at, and that's James Ellroy's command of story.

70
Time
Richard Corliss
Armed or not, Reeves is the weapon that can go off at any time. That's why Street Kings, though it isn't a great movie, is a pretty damn cool Keanu Reeves movie, one that on the Reevesian action scale measures somewhere between "Whoa" and "Wow."

70
The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
It’s easy to laugh at Street Kings for its bigger than big emotions, its preposterously kinky narrative turns and overwrought jawing and yowling, but there’s no doubt that it also keeps you watching, really watching, all the way to the end.

67
Austin Chronicle
Marjorie Baumgarten
A solid contemporary crime drama.

63
Premiere
Jenni Miller
If you’re looking for some big, stupid fun, you could do worse than Street Kings.

63
Boston Globe
Wesley Morris
Street Kings is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.

63
Miami Herald
Rene Rodriguez
The picture may feel more than a little familiar, but Ayer knows how to cook up intense setpieces, and Reeves keeps getting better at the weary hero role he continually gravitates toward.

63
ReelViews
James Berardinelli
Despite the predictability of the overall story arc, there's suspense and tension to be found between the credit sequences, but the movie is saddled with an ending that is both improbable and borderline insulting.

63
New York Post
Kyle Smith
A wet, red chunk of pulp that knows what it is and doesn't care.

60
Empire
Ian Nathan
Another mean, violent and decently acted slab of Ellroy-flavoured criminality, with an impressively battered Keanu Reeves, but Ayers is no Curtis Hanson.

58
Portland Oregonian
Shawn Levy
For what's essentially a bad movie, Street Kings is fairly tight and energetic.

58
Entertainment Weekly
Owen Gleiberman
Every so often, Keanu Reeves' robo-voiced blankness serves him well, but when he has to play a pulpy, tormented demon-saint, scraping up insults and spitting them out like bullets, he's like the host of an infomercial doing an impersonation of a badass.

58
Baltimore Sun
Michael Sragow
See it with people who take it for the trash it is, and you can cheer the baroque killings and laugh fondly with Forest Whitaker as he tries too hard to create a domestic sociopath to match his role as "Idi Amin."

58
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Scott Tobias
After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?

58
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
William Arnold
It's hard to recall another time when the cross-purposes of two collaborating filmmakers of a major film has been quite so evident, or when the theme of the movie itself has been so totally schizophrenic -- half populist outrage, half Nazi.

50
Chicago Reader
J.R. Jones
It preserves the peculiar machismo of Ayer's earlier projects: the alpha male dominates not only because he's the most powerful, but because he's the most jaded.

50
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
I enjoyed parts of Street Kings but I didn’t believe one thing about it, and I couldn’t get past Reeves’ unsuitability to his role. He may someday play a cop on the edge convincingly, but the edge needs to be sharper than this.

50
Slate
Dana Stevens
There's something cynical about Ayer's attempt to preserve Ludlow as a hero after scene upon scene meant to show, with heavy irony, how lawlessly he enforced the law. You can't lionize your "Dirty Harry" vigilante and expose his hypocrisy, too.

50
Village Voice
Tim Grierson
Ayer's grim police thriller mostly plays as one long dick-measuring competition. You sense that an infinitely more complex drama exists within the film's grasp, but no one bothered to stop guzzling the testosterone long enough to find it.

50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Stephen Cole
A bad-cop, worse-cop movie.

50
Rolling Stone
Peter Travers
The acting? Common and the Game score as baddies, but Hugh Laurie as an acid-tongued internal-affairs cop is disappointingly just House without the limp.

50
TV Guide
Maitland McDonagh
There are two kinds of police officers in David Ayers and James Ellroy's convoluted, ultraviolent tale of corruption within the LAPD: dirty cops and dirtier ones.

40
Washington Post
Desson Thomson
All the movie's treacheries, deceptions and story twists are marred by our lack of innocence. We see the big picture way before the characters do, and that pushes us right out of the movie and back into our seats -- the last place we want to be.

38
USA Today
Claudia Puig
Wastes a moderately intriguing premise by filling it with laughably clichéd dialogue, one-dimensional characters and implausible turns of events.

30
Film Threat
Pete Vonder Haar
Two things come to mind as you watch the first act of Street Kings, the first is how fresh and exciting the movie would’ve been if it was released in 1984, the second is the question, “James Ellroy wrote that?”


The average user rating for this movie is 7.5 (out of 10) based on 35 User Votes
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