Kritiken

Gal is part of a sincere love story that shapes the gangster sequences with touches so understated that they feel like momentary hallucinations... This all-consuming love is made explicit in one phone call, which is the romantic pinnacle of this film. Our culture usually talks about love in ecstatic, abstract metaphors. It's easier to blow this exulted emotion up than to pin it down but, casually, amid all the dangerous hustle and bustle, Sexy Beast absolutely nails it.

[Glazer's[ attentive camera and inclination to inactivity without any sort of audience catharsis is a shrewd directorial decision; the film's action comes from extended dialogues that let the performances percolate until they're on the verge of exploding. It's telling that the climactic heist that hovers over the film only takes about 10% of the running time and is over with quickly, as Glazer's interests lie in the willful ignorance and immaturity of his characters.

Sexy Beast is a film made by an artist certain he would never have an opportunity to make another: Nothing else could account for the volume and intensity of its ideas, with which it seems fit to burst. There isn't a frame in the film that isn't meticulously composed and ornamented, as if Glazer were determined to ensure that nothing went to waste — an approach that might have seemed tiresome in less capable hands but makes for rich, lively cinema here.

Many commentators have suggested that the film's great weakness lies in the searing intensity of Kingsley's performance and the gaping abyss his character's death leaves in the film. Rather, I would suggest that this narrative choice, and the kind of numbing of intensity it enables, is in fact the film's great virtue, the element which most clearly marks the film's revisionist attitude to the genre from which it harks.

My willingness to stay interested in the plot and be impressed by Kingsley's show-offy performance as a staccato bully out of Harold Pinter was eventually undermined by the movie's violent editing and violent sound, which, coming on top of the character, drove violence to the point of redundancy.