Synopsis
George is a small-time crook just out of prison who discovers his tough-guy image is out of date. Reduced to working as a minder/driver for high class call girl Simone, he has to agree when she asks him to find a young colleague from her King's Cross days. That's when George's troubles just start.
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Cast
- Bob HoskinsGeorge
- Cathy TysonSimone
- Michael CaineMortwell
- Robbie ColtraneThomas
- Clarke PetersAnderson
- Kate HardieCathy
- Zoë NathensonJeannie
- Sammi DavisMay
- Joe BrownDudley
- Pauline MelvilleGeorge's Wife
Recommendations
- 100
Chicago Sun-Times
The movie's ending is a little too neat for my taste. But in a movie like this, everything depends on atmosphere and character, and "Mona Lisa" knows exactly what it is doing. - 100
ReelViews
In an era when movies about love almost always invariably devolve into formulaic affairs, Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa stands out as an often-surprising, multi-layered achievement. By offering a rumination on a wide variety of love - real, imagined, romantic, sexual, and platonic - Mona Lisa defies easy categorization and offers a complex and superior one-hundred minutes for all who view it. - 100
Time Out
A wonderful achievement, a dark film with a generous heart in the shape of an extraordinarily touching performance from Hoskins. - 100
CineVue
Shines out as a rough diamond, a masterpiece of British cinema undeniably worthy of its classical title. - 90
Chicago Reader
Director Neil Jordan (Danny Boy, The Company of Wolves) does a good job of re-creating the dark romanticism of American film noir, and if the project does feel a little like a hand-me-down, it is graced by Jordan's fine, contemporary feel for bright, artificial colors and creatively mangled space. - 83
The A.V. Club
His vision is most immediately reminiscent of from the hellish New York of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, but Hoskins provides the crucial difference, spiking the nihilism by emerging from the abyss with a glimmer of hope instead of a thousand-yard stare. - 80
Empire
The world Jordan envisions is desperate, but Hoskins’s human heart offers a lovely thread of hope. - 75
TV Guide Magazine
MONA LISA is a detailed, thoughtful film that sensitively explores the emotions within its seedy, exploitative milieu.
