Kurt Loder
MTV
"Depp's charm works against him in portraying Dillinger as a cold-blooded gunman - he lacks the requisite sense of menace, no matter how energetically he goes through the motions of bullet-fueled mayhem. Still, the motions - the jailbreaks, robberies and ferocious shootouts, with tommy guns barking and gangsters in their new Ford V-8s leaving underpowered lawmen in the dust - are spectacularly well-staged. There's an opening escape from the Indiana State Penitentiary in which the bleak, towering walls of the prison, and the flawless blue sky they can't quite blot out, convey feelings of both hopeless confinement and beckoning freedom in a single resonant image. Equally striking is the sequence in which Dillinger is recaptured and flown back to Indiana, where he's met at the airport by a roiling herd of reporters and cameramen, whose smoke-belching flashguns light up the windy night with a lurid magnesium glare. (It feels like we're present at the birth of paparazzi journalism.) Mann and Dante Spinotti, the great cinematographer with whom he worked on such movies as "The Insider" and "Heat," opted for HD cameras in shooting the film, and digital has rarely been used to such rich effect."

Michael Sragow
Baltimore Sun
"Public Enemies provides a welcome shock to the system. This tough-minded, visually electric movie about Great Depression bank robber John Dillinger ( Johnny Depp) takes audiences into the center of the action in its opening minutes. It keeps them there as it expands into a bristling chronicle of a country in flux. Without ever telling viewers what to think or how to feel, it raises more questions about the corruption of crime and crime fighting than any expose or thesis. And if it sometimes registers too coolly, by the end it rouses more bruised feelings than any four-hankie weepie."

Lisa Schwarzbaum
Entertainment Weekly
"The gangster-in-chief is played by Johnny Depp, one of the most effortlessly elegant, intriguingly self-contained American movie stars on screen today. But that mystery comes with a price. By the end of this arm's-length study, Depp's Dillinger comes across as an interesting cat, but never a knowable man - he's a pop cultural phenomenon because the movie asserts he is, not because we believe it. We don't feel the bank robber's heartbeat the way we felt the agonies of Russell Crowe's whistle-blower at the end of "The Insider" - or even grooved on the rhythms of cops Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs on Mann's stylish "Miami Vice."

Gary Thompson
Philadelphia Daily News
"So the classic Mann setup is formed - smart and dedicated men on either side of the law, working with cool precision to destroy the other. There are other familiar Mann figures here - the woman who both loves and fears the obsessions of her man. Here it's Marion Cotillard as Dillinger's lover, a fellow social outcast for whom money means access to speakeasy society. Class resentment is a theme; the script positions Dillinger as an outlaw "Seabiscuit," capturing the imagination of a beleaguered country, but Mann leaves it underdeveloped.

"It's one of a dozen pithy ideas floating around "Public Enemies" half-formed. Like Dillinger as doomed individualist - he was dimed-out by the Chicago syndicate, which saw that his small-time freelancing attracted unwanted federal attention.

"Mann also mocks Hoover's expansionism (the title is a double entendre), and his movie warns against unchecked federal power, which pointedly takes the form of high-tech surveillance and then torture (though in "Enemies," torture actually works). Purvis, partly because he tolerates such excess, loses a bit of his soul in apprehending Dillinger, while Dillinger himself is elevated to tragic mystic. He spends his last hours in Chicago's Biograph theater watching a Clark Gable gangster movie, a scene that fuses notoriety with celebrity, and hints that Dillinger sensed the squad of executioners who waited outside.

"It doesn't all work, but quite a bit of it does, like the strangely lyrical final scene. There are enough good moments to please Mann's fans, but the "Transformers" crowd may be lost."