Details here.

Count me in. I'm always there for a Mamet film, especially when he has his usual suspects like Jay and Mantegna. But TIM ALLEN? That's really cool.

This seems to have fallen off the raider, despite a limited opening today and wide release next weekend.

The second, very different trailer is up here.
Metacritic currently has the movie at 70%, while Rotten Tomatoes at 65% (the top critics have it at 88%...as I figured).

I'm looking forward to it; I really like David Mamet as a writer and director, even with some of his glaring flaws. A couple folks that saw advance screenings compared it to Mamet's last directorial effort, Spartan. I take this as a good thing.

Cinematical's review:

Heh. Stephen Whitty:

There are a few things you should know about David Mamet. This is one of the things. The thing is that there is a way his characters talk. There is a way his characters talk that is not always in the accepted idiom. It is in the idiom of Harold Pinter, as maybe rewritten by Damon Runyon's freakin' bartender.

Tasha Robinson, at the A.V. Club

Like so many ambitious writers, David Mamet has many faces. There's the street-smart thriller craftsman behind Homicide, Heist, and Spartan. The sly, stagey twist-meister behind House Of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, and Glengarry Glen Ross. The sentimental softie of Things Change and State And Main. (There's also the work-for-hire hack that signed onto the screenplay for Hannibal, and the clumsy, self-satisfied provocateur who wrote Oleanna, but the less said about them, the better.) But no previous project has so thoroughly fused his filmmaking facets as Redbelt, a superior, sophisticated, and unusually gentle character study where the point isn't the twists, so much as watching how one man's belief system holds up through them.

This one's been completely off my radar, but when I saw Mamet's name, the first thing I thought was, "After Mamet's recent denunciation of liberalism, I bet critics tear this movie up." Simplistic thinking, yes, but rooted in past experience. I've seen the local TV critic here turn on performers and reporters as soon as they reveal themselves to be conservatives, or heck, libertarians.

So it's with some relief that the RT rating is as high as it is on this one. Maybe it's being judged on its merits, and not the writer's semi-conversion.

I thought this was a well-done film. I liked that Mamet seemed to be a using more natural approach to dialogue this time out, rather than the tightly-clipped rhythmic approach I've heard in some of his past films. I liked that this film was a sensitive character study in the guise of a sports film, and that he didn't overdo it on the fight scenes. Mixed martial arts gets kind of boring after the second or third time you see a guy thrown on the floor and twisted like a pretzel.

I agree with your review 100%. Very solid, well-written, well-acted. If you like Mamet, you'll like it. It had more of a natural feel than many of his other films. It's a quiet picture, certainly, but I felt this tension brewing under the entire time. It's Mamet, so you know there be a con of some sort. And even though I knew it was coming, that didn't make it any more stunning or upsetting when it happened.

And the ending, which received some undue criticism, is a quiet moral victory that made me emotional, maybe more than it should have.

ANYONE else see this (besides Crow, I mean)? It's definitely been one of the best I've seen this year.

I really liked it. It's a film as spartan as its protagonist: honest, disciplined, and, judging by the box office numbers, addicted to poverty.

Left me pretty cold. There are some nice things about it -- but I found it too overtly metaphorical and not "realistic" enough to take seriously. The closing sequence, for instance, while reflecting a laudable morality, was just not plausible.

Oh, agreed — I realize this is how Mamet operates, though, and as a fan I'm willing to give him some slack. Regardless of its implausibility, it left me reeling.

That's certainly a characteristic of his mind-game films, yes. But his dramas -- even Oleanna -- tend to be more grounded in the real world than this film is. It looks like straight drama, but it's as arch, controlled, and staged as House of Games or Heist or The Spanish Prisoner. Did not work for me. And I'm a big Mamet fan, too.