That was an excellent one.

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

This is a staring contest. Someone asks Matt Damon's character and he stares off into space. Too many changes of dates and a very confused story line. This movie is about something but exactly what eludes me. The Whiffenpoofs are seen in some musical presentations but no good show of their talent is to be found here. The old cars look nice. Matt is supposed to age more than twenty years but that doesn't happen at all.This is not an entertaining film in my opinion. Lots of people here did like it. The one very good scene I recommend watching is the parachute scene near the end. How did they do that? My guess is the stunt is what cost the $90 million.

'What do you people have?''The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.' --Best dialog of the movie! I liked this film more than the average reviewer for the simple reason that, as a history buff, I was at least acquainted with a good deal of the lore of those times and the CIA (JFK & Bay of Pigs, post-war Germany, even CIA drug use for interrogation purposes). And this really is rather essential to a fuller enjoyment of the movie, as I suspect why there was a good deal of ambivalence for it from others. De Niro did a credible job directing, but it was obviously assumed that viewers would have more knowledge of those times than most people probably do, due to the fact that the film did have a tendency to skim over some of the events and minutiae that likely could have used further elucidation. Of course, at well over 2-hours in length, this would not have been practical.The cast was great... with one exception. Damon did a convincing job of playing a soulless bureaucrat, I'll take that any day. While, the one exception, was Angelina Jolie- who I feel was miscast in her role as Damon's estranged wife. She typically is miscast in anything outside of flash and dash type of flix. But that's a somewhat off-topic matter.

A fictionalization of the origins of the CIA, DeNiro's second film behind the camera tells the story of Edward Wilson (Damon) who goes from university lad to civil servant to one of the founders of the CIA, which gets its baptism of fire in the heated political climate of the 1960s as it battles the threat of Communism. Of course, the paranoia and intrigue soon envelop Wilson's existence.Well filmed but less substantial and much slower than it ought to be. 'Good Shepherd' is a great idea, discussing the origins of the CIA, that is ultimately too dragged out and not incisive enough to make it stick. The political intrigue never feels engrossing enough, the tension never consistently palpable enough, the sense of how Wilson's work affects the outer world never feeling present enough. In fact, half of the film is basically a biopic about Wilson, charting his youth and civil service days, as well as his courting and marriage to Jolie's character (this a film that clocks in at over two and a half hours, may I remind you), and though not poorly written, it wears out its welcome well before we get to any secret service business. This is a real slow burner, which not always a bad thing, but here, the pacing sags a lot because of all this perfunctory material that could've been condensed to a few flashbacks or even a vignette, instead of getting to the LeCarre style spy intrigue, which is when the film does pick up, but I really question if Eric Roth's script needed to be this bulky with material.On the plus side, DeNiro is a very strong director, with some really tense sequences and intrigue in that second half, as well as a very shadowy, almost sepia aesthetic to the film which enhances that sort of 'secret archive footage' look that fits a spy tale rather well. And well, with someone like DeNiro in charge, it goes without saying he roped in a bunch of strong performers, on top of a very restrained Damon, including the likes of Alec Baldwin, Bill Hurt, John Tuturro, Michael Gambon, Joe Pesci and Timothy Hutton. This wasn't a film made with slack, but it seems like the prestige came before the substance. Well performed and mounted, and not without ambition or merits, there is simply no denying where it fell down, and that makes 'Good Shepherd' a noble but still, nonetheless, disappointment all the same.

The story uses back and forth story flow very nicely in building the background story completely and at the same time focus on the issue at hand. The espionage details are depicted and presented very nicely through the extensive help from the camera angles and zoom plays. I must say I was amazed to see so many big names performing greatly in this movie. Matt Damon performs greatly here, going out of the Bourne espionage character that made him famous, into one that is non operative yet still demands at least the same attention to detail. Angelina Jolie managed to pull out the balancing side for the story. Michael Gambon and Alec Baldwin also did well in filling in the shoes of those characters that don't take much duration.