Today's the day–PUBLIC ENEMIES opens in movie theaters across North America
One year and one day after it wrapped principal photography in California, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies debuts on the big screen–actually 3,334 big screens across North America–today. A tense and gripping inspection of the criminal career of superstar bank robber John Dillinger, Mann’s Public Enemies also shows us a way of life that was vanishing even as its characters lived it: the film is elegaic in more ways than one. Public Enemies stars Johnny Depp as the doomed gangster, Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard as Billie Frechette, and Christian Bale as Melvin Purvis, the FBI agent heading the Dillinger investigation.
Public Enemies has earned many outstanding reviews from some of the country’s toughest critics. Manohla Dargis, writing in The New York Times, calls Public Enemies “a grave and beautiful work of art” that “looks and plays like no other American gangster film I can think of.” Indeed, to call it a “gangster film” is almost too reductive: Public Enemies is an American tragedy, and it will haunt you long after you leave the theater. –Part-Time Poet