Photo Gallery

has both its advantages and its drawbacks, it would seem. Critics are, for

the most part, praising his performance in the prison drama The Last Castle, in which he stars opposite Robert Redford.

Yet many of those

same critics complain that The Last Castle compares poorly with

The Sopranos, the HBO series that made Gandolfini a big star to begin

with.

(In a feature about the movie appearing in today's Toronto

Globe & Mail writer Simon Houpt observed: "The Sopranos is so

finely wrought, and his work in it so sublime, it is disturbing to see him

in something as hackneyed as The Last Castle.")

Nevertheless, the

film has received several raves. Jonathan Foreman in the New York Post

writes that it is a rare pleasure to see a movie "that combines exciting

action with a smart, well-informed script and vivid yet restrained

performances."

On the other hand, across town at the New York Daily News,

writer Jack Mathews scoffs, "I don't know why Redford and the white-hot

Gandolfini signed on for this fiasco."

Los Angeles Daily News critic

Bob Strauss voices a similar verdict. The film, he says, "manages to be

howlingly simplistic and ridiculously illogical at the same time."

Curiously, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times admits he has

ambivalent feelings about the movie: "The immediate experience of watching

The Last Castle is strongly involving, and the action at the end,

exciting," he writes. "It's the kind of movie people tell you they saw last

night and really liked. I really liked it last night, too. It's only this

morning that I'm having trouble with it."