“J. Edgar Hoover‘s mystique lies in the fact that while he kept meticulous files with compromising details on some of America’s most powerful figures, nobody knew the man’s own secrets,” writes Variety‘s Peter Debruge. “Therefore, any movie in which the longtime FBI honcho features as the central character must supply some insight into what made him tick, or suffer from the reality that the Bureau’s exploits were far more interesting than the bureaucrat who ran it — a dilemma J. Edgar never rises above.”
