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The film is drawing high praise from critics. In the Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert commented that with Promises Cronenberg has emerged into "the top rank of directors." Acceding to Cronenberg's request to critics not to give away the plot, Ebert concluded his review by remarking intriguingly, "The actors and the characters merge and form a reality above and apart from the story, and the result is a film that takes us beyond crime and London and the Russian mafia and into the mystifying realms of human nature." In the New York Daily News, Jack Mathews wrote, "Eastern Promises is the first must-see adult film of the young fall." Desson Thomson in the Washington Post commented that Cronenberg "has created a movie that is contemporary storytelling at its finest." A.O. Scott in the New York Times concluded his review by remarking that Promises is "a movie whose images and implications are likely to stay in your head for a long time." But Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times, while calling the film "expertly realized and gunmetal slick," nevertheless commented that it "doesn't stir much in the way of visceral horror despite its penchant for treating the human body like a chicken carcass on a block." And Bruce Westbrook in the Houston Chronicle suggested that Cronenberg merely leads the moviegoer into "a stifling descent into grim shock and disturbing awe. For Cronenberg, such cheap sensationalism is business as usual, and this far into his career, that business has slipped into artistic bankruptcy."

viggo takes it all off, and really takes off in a movie that declines, for once, to glamorize professional crime, and delivers strong performances from all its actors.