2 Days in the Valley has two subjects: twisted human behavior, and the complexity of its own plot. It looks like a crime movie, but crime is the medium, not the message; the crimes are an excuse for quick connections among strangers. What the writer-director, John Herzfeld, is mostly interested in are his peculiar characters, and the labyrinthine ways he can assemble them in the same story. His method has been used before (the movie will remind you of Altman and Tarantino), but he’s good at it. Herzfeld begins with inexplicable scenes and unexplained actions, and then connects the dots until everything comes together. The ending is neat and ingenious; the story is so complex, you wonder if he started there and worked backward (…) It’s fun to watch 2 Days in the Valley in the moment, and then fun afterward to think about the way the story was put together, and all of those lives connected. — Roger Ebert