An Officer and a Spy
| Release Date: August 8, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
60
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews
Positive:
6
Mixed:
9
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
RogerEbert.comGlenn KennyAug 8, 2025
Jean Dujardin, who’s best known here for a still-controversial performance in Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist,” is utterly flawless as Picquart, maintaining proper military bearing even as he begins to seethe with indignation. Read full review
90
Film ThreatTerry SherwoodDec 4, 2025
Roman Polanski’s J’Accuse, released internationally as An Officer and a Spy, is a brilliant exercise in controlled storytelling, visual discipline, and moral searching. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithAug 8, 2025
Though the affair dragged on so long before Dreyfus was finally cleared that Mr. Polanski confines the resolution to an epilogue, he has nevertheless made an oft-told tale lively and urgent. “An Officer and a Spy” is Mr. Polanski’s finest work in many years. Read full review
80
The GuardianXan BrooksAug 30, 2019
It’s a solid, well-crafted piece of professional carpentry, like a heavy piece of Victorian furniture; built to last; built to be used. The longer you look at it, the more impressive it grows. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineEli FriedbergAug 4, 2025
The sum of its aesthetics, as in The Pianist, feels at once like a gritty window into history as it was and a haunting amber-trapped essence of the feeling of an age. Read full review
70
Screen DailyTim GriersonAug 30, 2019
Jean Dujardin is quietly excellent as the French officer whose growing conviction that Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) is innocent of treason puts him on a collision course with his superiors. The Oscar-winning actor provides the film with its soulful centre, despite the familiarity of the material and its procedural tone. Read full review
60
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 13, 2019
This is a sober, stiff-collared procedural, handsomely shot but also oddly bloodless until the more conventional paranoid-thriller rhythms of its final act kick in. Read full review
60
CineVueJohn BleasdaleSep 2, 2019
The film itself is utterly uncontroversial, solid, occasionally stolid, and perfectly fine. Read full review
60
The Hollywood ReporterDeborah YoungAug 30, 2019
One couldn’t wish for a more painstakingly researched or beautifully rendered account of the infamous Dreyfus affair than Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse).... Yet the result is oddly lacking in heart and soul, almost as though a mask of military discipline held it in check. Read full review
55
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeAug 30, 2019
Any controversy that might erupt over Roman Polanski’s decision to implicitly equate himself with one of history’s greatest victims of injustice is dissipated by the resultant film’s tepid listlessness. Read full review
50
The New YorkerRichard BrodyAug 14, 2025
Rather than reconsidering history by intimate acquaintance with a lesser-known hero, it turns its hero into a stick figure no more personalized, complex, or contextualized than a comic-book creation. Far from arousing curiosity, the movie forecloses it. Read full review
50
The New York TimesManohla DargisAug 7, 2025
An Officer and a Spy is well-crafted; Polanski’s movies generally are. Its contribution to cinema’s role in historical storytelling, though, seems largely as an allegory about Polanski. Read full review
50
The PlaylistChristina NewlandAug 30, 2019
It’s a middling historical drama, finely crafted and ever so slightly stodgy in spite of a compelling last act. Read full review
50
VarietyOwen GleibermanAug 30, 2019
An Officer and a Spy has a this-happened-and-then-this-happened quality. And that’s why the movie, beneath the two-dimensional jauntiness of its acting and the period vividness of its sets and costumes, feels more dutiful than riveting. Read full review
42
IndieWireDavid EhrlichAug 30, 2019
A peevish and self-satisfied procedural that unravels the Dreyfus Affair with all the journalistic doggedness of “Spotlight,” but none of the same integrity. Read full review
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