Metacritic reviews

Allen's dialogue is witty, his plotting zings along with forward momentum in all the right places, and his observation of elastic moral principles in flux is both mischievous and unsettling, yielding a tasty final-act Hitchcockian twist.

Irrational Man heads to one of the most startling pieces of action he’s ever filmed. It hints where he stands now as a moralist or cynic in a corrupt world.

Allen’s visual direction and editing rhythms are particularly sharp and precise this time around, as is his work with the actors.

If the genre elements sustain the work as a whole, the plot suffers from the meandering quality that frequently plagues late period Allen work. Still, the filmmaking finds its groove in individual moments.

Woody Allen and Joaquin Phoenix's collaboration on Irrational Man's antihero is the closest the film gets to a saving grace.

His characters may spout Kant and debate the ethics of different human interactions, but it's only sugar coating on top of what is effectively a simple and familiar story.

Both leads produce solid performances despite a sloppiness in both the direction and the writing.

Irrational Man is a good idea, a sketch for a movie, but the movie itself is unrealised.

Allen has worked wonders in the past with superficially similar moral tales, but this one’s a sketchy rehash.

It's not funny enough to be a comedy, not well plotted enough to be a thriller but it's also not smart enough to be an actual exploration of all or even any of the many philosophies it, and Abe Lucas, espouses.