SOURCE: Kauffmann, Stanley. “Crimes and Various Criminals.” New Republic 205, no. 18 (28 October 1991): 26-7.

In the following excerpt, Kauffmann negatively assesses the film Homicide.

Up to now David Mamet has usually been very sure about where he stood in relation to realism. In plays like American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, he intensified realism past naturalism to the point of abstraction. In a play like The Water Engine or a screenplay like House of Games, he began with a species of abstraction and used realism as underpinning. But his second screenplay, Things Change, seemed less secure vis-à-vis realism. His third is even less secure. (I'm speaking only of the screenplays he wrote for himself to direct.) Homicide is worrisome.

The first half-hour or so is the best police film I can remember. Joe Mantegna, a Mamet stalwart, plays a Jewish metropolitan detective named Bobby Gold. (Mamet has written two...