beorhhouse I was really liking this slow, well-acted film until the rock music started blaring, of course reminding everyone of the rock music so prevalent in the 1940s. Not. I turned it off. Enough said.

Bene Cumb Toronto was seemingly a nice and secure town after the World War II, and no or poor security measures in prisons and banks made gangs' ideas and plans easy to fulfill and proceed. Moreover, radios and black-and-white newspapers were not much of help in engaging co-citizens for identification and informing about criminals. Such was the surroundings where Boyd and his fellows lived their life; not as brightly as their U.S. counterparts before and then, which is probably the reason why the depiction is not that catchy and even robberies resemble asking money nicely in the presence of guns... Pre-robbery scenes are too long and only loosely connected with the remaining story, and the ending is rather awkward. The cast is uneven as well, with non-Canadians performing more versatile (Kelly Reilly as Doreen Boyd and Brian Cox as Glover); those presenting the Boyd gang seemed not catchy to me.Thus, an above-average story based on real events and characters, but not a must-see movie.

Tony Heck "Your dreams, you made them ours. I believed you. I didn't think it would be like this Eddie." Eddie Boyd (Speedman) is living day to day as a bus driver trying to provide for his family. When a rider boards his bus one day he rethinks his life. With his house facing foreclosure and barely being able to scrape by he goes to a director in hopes of becoming a movie star. When all else fails he resorts to robbing banks. I knew very little about this going in and was actually surprised when I found out that this was a true story. This movie is very very similar to "Public Enemies" in story and pacing. While this was a good movie that is worth watching it is feels very long and drawn out. Speedman does a pretty good job in this as well as most of the other cast. The only real problem I had with this was the same I had with "Public Enemies". I felt it hard to stay focused on it the entire time and was losing interest off and on. This is not a bad movie but be prepared for it. Overall, as close to a remake of "Public Enemies" you can get. Good, but long. I give it a B-.

adrianionescu "Citizen Gangster" is a low budget movie about a WWII Canadian soldier who felt so alienated in the humdrum of peace-time Toronto, that he started robbing banks for a living, around the year 1949. It's a story in the vein of "Public Enemies", Goddard's "Breathless", "Bonnie and Clyde", you name it, as you've seen it countless times: the "loveable" gangster, who fights not only society's rules, but also the conformity of being a square jawed bully with a gun.This one, Eddie Alonzo Boyd (Scott Speedman, "Milk"), married with two children, secretly leaves his bus driving day job, and takes his war-time Luger to a personal war against poverty (and... boredom?). He disguises himself with sinister make-up reminding us of The Joker, which thus becomes his signature look; he jumps graciously over bank counters right into the lap of young female tellers, asking them politely, and at gun point, to "fill the bag".His family life is destroyed after his secret is revealed, and a nondescript police detective manages to botch one of his downtown hits and cuff him. But Boyd breaks out of jail with a couple of acolytes (among which another WWII veteran, with a wooden leg), and gets back to being the "dazzling" bank robber young Canadian women have come to be fond of.The film tries to give some meaning to the conflicted love between Boyd and his all-too devoted wife (Kelly Reilly, "Sherlock Holmes"), then it attempts to sprinkle glitz over the "wild" lifestyle of the outlaws (where everybody parties in a sordid building), and finally strikes a tragic chord with the re-capturing of Eddie Boyd and his men in the middle of a snowy field outside Toronto.This movie is also the story of a young Canadian director (Nathan Morlando) who struggles with poor resources, fails to be inventive enough in his use of clichés (nods to predecessors are OK, as long as they're a means to an end), and reaches the finish line of his first feature film exhausted, and with a feeling of emptiness. The characters are choppy, the love story a bit drab, and the only thing that seems accomplished is the film's overall sense of pace.When the only things you have are a few interiors and a bunch of moderately good actors, I guess the way to go around a story like that is to build characters accurately, develop relationships meaningfully, and weave creative dialogue in the framework of a conventional plot: none of which happened in "Citizen Gangster".