Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s Ordinary Decent Criminal, a slick gangster caper, peppered with satire, irony, wit and slapstick is, without doubt, postmodern. It blurs distinctions between reality and fantasy, and the real and the fake within and beyond the film (…). Though the film, at times beautifully and stylishly shot, and directed with a sure hand, appropriates American genre and film history and makes use of the star system, it nevertheless does not lose sight of the cultural specificity that is contemporary Ireland, and in that way operates as an imaginative social text. — Brian McFarlane