rikbloom-115-127800 When I first heard HBO was putting out a film on the life of Myer Lansky starring Richard Dreyfuss, who I really admire, my initial reaction was can he pull this off? I totally underestimated his abilityas an actor. Part of my thinking was within the look-a-like department.But with Ricard Drefyuss, along with Joshua Praw and Ryan Merriman (who both play the younger Lansky) I felt that director John McNaughton,along with Richard Dreyfus' ability to clone the movements and essential dramatic aspect, for his portrayal of Myer Lansky made this film work for me. With Anthony LaPaglia (as Charles "Lucky "Luciano),and the incomparable Eric Roberts (as Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel), as the frosting on the cake. While I really admired Warren Beatty's version of Siegel (Bugsy 1991) Robert's performance will grow on you in a different positive way. The fact that Myer Lansky outlived all of his contemporaries, without ever getting convicted of a crime, is an amazing thing in of itself. His ability to constantly evade, truth in life, was enough to get me interested in his story, along with the fact that I had read the books by Uri Dan and Dennis Eisenberg piqued my interest even further. Some have said the screen writers miss a lot the factual points of Myer Lansky's life, but how can we truly argue this point, when we have no concrete idea of what these points were? I watched the original airing of Lansky on February 27th, 1999 on HBO. I do not take to a lot of movies right away but the more I watched "Lansky" the more it grew on me. I now consider it one of my favorite films. On the negative side I wish the film could have been much longer, with more dramatic detail (whether these details were true or not) While the film does show Lansky's initial meeting with Anna Citron, the film does not extrapolate on her eventual outcome. Another thing to consider is if dramatic films covered all the absolute truths,they would lose some of their entertainment value (for me) I have documentaries for that area. The cinematography, along with the orchestral soundtrack, along with the popular hits of that time period are also superb." Lansky" also does a credible job of capturing the period settings (e.g. turn of the century lower east side) I highly recommend the film "Lansky"

kevin-caprani This tells the story of Meyer Lansky, a big time crook or not depending on your viewpoint, the film shows lansky as a guy in his old age looking back on his life in short clip flashbacks, it tells us the major events and the development of his crime empire, the script is poor the acting stilted, despite some major acting talent in the film, at no point is there any dramatic tension or blood stirring action, it meanders towards a totally unstartling conclusion, it turns out the lights, puts itself to bed, and goes to sleep with anyone watching having already got there an hour beforehand, really don't watch it, it should have been attention grabbing and entertaining, its a 1 out of ten for me.

Iva96 To put it in a few words: not enough real facts, not deep psychological analysis of the characters. The only good thing about the movie is the acting. But it does not make it for the movie length...After seeing the trailer, I waited the movie with very high expectations. I mean, hello, this was a movie about Meyer Lansky, the brain behind the Syndicate, one of the most influent mob leaders ever. An ocean of opportunities... And, what did I get for the two hours spent in front of the TV? just a big mark of question: "what did it want from me?!" There was not the rush and the fascinating action from "goodfellas" or "casino", nor the sympathetic romantic retrospective from "bugsy", and it was far from stories like "once upon a time in America". The biography is romanced and extremely brief. If you do not know the real life of Lansky, for sure you will not understand too many things from this movie. If you know it, you will be disappointed. And if the intention was to analyze the feelings and emotions of the character, well then, it didn't do it deep enough.

deemo31 There are a lot of truly great actors in this movie. Illeana Douglas. Max Perlich. Dreyfus. Eric Roberts. Lots of them. But the dialogue in this movie is horrible. The acting is stilted because of that. And the story is just not believable. It almost seems as if the writers tried to grasp onto the "mob" madness and cut and pasted other stories to come up with this one. It is not believable. Meyer Lansky was a gangster. This movie portrays him as some kind of innocent victim of circumstance. Simply untrue. He was not a victim. When you see this film, you get the impression that he was somehow compromised by the government because he was a Jew. A real look into who he was will tell a different story. And this is not it.