(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

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MARK KERMODE:
I don't think anyone has done it any favours by saying it's the best crime movie since the God father cos- it isn't. It isn't even a gangster movie, it's an adaptation of a comic strip, which is visually beautiful, Conrad Hall has done a fantastic job in getting that comic strip look like the Hughes Brothers' movie From Hell did. The problem is that the graphic novel that it is based on is raw and ragged around the edges, inspired by a film which is even rougher. The movie lacks ruggedness or roughness.

The story is that Tom Hanks is a killer, but I never believed he was. I don't think that's because Hanks is a bad actor, I think it's because the film wants him to be too nice. The one person who had the tone right was Jude Law, who does this lolliping, cartooney-style killer. I thought he was in the right film. The problem with the rest of it, it was trying to raise the comic book form into something which became rather ponderous and full of itself.

NATASHA WALTER:
It is a film that looks wonderful and has this very elegiac quality from the beginning. It doesn't have raw edges, it is smoothed out and sometimes the action becomes almost balletic, the extraordinary shootout sequences, where you lose the real sound and get the machine gun fire through the flashes, which gives it a distancing effect. You are not watching reality, you are watching memory or a dream sequence. I found that quite compelling while I was watching it and I found the rhythm of the film quite compelling, the way that you know what will happen at the end and it's satisfying having this inexorable journey towards that pay-off. But although I found it compelling to watch. When I left the cinema I felt cheated. I felt emotionally null, as though I had never been able to engage with the characters, they had just been set to dance in this ballet. Although there is moralising, none of us will ever see heaven and so on, it seemed to have no moral engagement.

ADAM MARS-JONES:
Whose story is being told? We have the son's voiceover, but most of the key scenes happen in the absence of the son. Because of the delusive visual presentation, they have not worked out how to tell the story. What is interesting about the casting of Hanks is that it is in a way against the tide but a post-modern casting. There was a time you casted Carey Grant as the killer and the studio would not let you have that as an ending, he would have to turn out to be misunderstood. Something equally flattened out happens; we have a fat girl in the movie, who do we get to play her: Gwynneth Paltrow because they like her already. This happened with Hanks, in Philadelphia, not because he was good at playing a gay guy, but because they knew he wasn't gay and they could go on liking him. They have installed a script by-pass, so they don't need to dramatise the likability of the monster.

This transcript was produced from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight. It has been checked against the programme as broadcast, however Newsnight can accept no responsibility for any factual inaccuracies. We will be happy to correct serious errors.