Veteran director Sidney Lumet has made many above-average films in his time, but 'The Anderson Tapes', a generic heist thriller from the early 1970s, is not one of them. The dialogue and acting (including that of lead Sean Connery) are both poor, and the Quincey Jones score is horrid; the camera work is better but insufficient to compensate for a movie where none of the characters seem wholly real (in a way quite typical of indifferent movies from this era). Another problem is that the film lacks purpose; the tapes of the title seem quite irrelevant, and although the confused ending is in some sense superior to the glossy "perfection" at the conclusion of movies like "Ocean's Eleven", the viewer is still left asking "so what?". Overall, this not an awful film, but it is lacking in much to distinguish it from the very large number of similar movies.
Review of The Anderson Tapes
