I feel a little strange posting these premature reviews because no one’s yet seen it. It’s probably best to skim a little and shoot for the money shot so that you don’t know too much. Of course, if you’ve read the script or seen the play you’ll already know too much anyway.
The Playlist says it’s pretty darned good, in fact, The Ides of March, and singles out our 2011 Man of the Year, Ryan Gosling (could a Sexiest Man Alive cover be too far behind?):
Gosling, incidentally, caps off an extraordinary twelve months with another top turn. It really is his show, the film’s riffing on idealism really a feint for a picture about the loss of a soul. Maybe it happens a little fast, but, like Michael Corleone, Stephen is defeated by the business, a virtual robot at the end. We say virtual, because Gosling’s chilly surface still reveals a hint of the regret that will clearly haunt the character forever.
And Guy Lodge at In Contention doesn’t hate it – gives it three out of four stars:
What we get instead is an absorbing, occasionally witty liberal suit-opera on “West Wing” lines that nonetheless holds its juiciest sub-plots on a leash. The storyline handed ensemble standout Evan Rachel Wood, lithe, snappy and eventually affecting as a bright young intern whose attraction to Gosling unwittingly jeopardizes all three principals’ careers, is initially the most promising of these, holding interesting implications about the longer ladder still reserved for women in politics — until the character is dropped in a datedly dismissive fashion that renders her entire arc a mere device. It’s not the only respect in which Clooney and Heslov’s script resembles a highbrow Hollywood screed from the 1940s updated with some token references to the Drudge Report era. (For one thing, the film’s view of the media is decidedly quaint: Tomei appears to be the last surviving political journalist in the United States, while the internet is something people use to arrange booty calls.)