Irish Film Institute -Review Roundup: You Were Never Really Here, Sweet Country and Wonder Wheel

Review Roundup: You Were Never Really Here, Sweet Country and Wonder Wheel

Check out a selection of reviews below for new releases on Friday March 9th 2018: You Were Never Really Here, Wonder Wheel and Sweet Country.

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE
“It is a brash, noisy, violent picture, but it is also a subtle, intricate, thoughtful one. Ramsay can stake a reasonable claim to being the best British film-maker of her generation.”
5/5 – Irish Times

“The film drop-kicks you into a cosmos of pain, depravity and blunt-force trauma with only the faintest flickers of light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not an experience to relish, exactly, but it’s still one that’s fully capable of blowing you away.”
5/5 – Telegraph

“In choosing Phoenix as her conduit for biblical wrath she has cast perfectly, and as Joe he gives one of the performances of his career. In this character’s constant struggle to stay connected to his humanity, we are reminded to never lose touch with ours.”
4/5 – RTE

“The ghost of Travis Bickle haunts this nightmarish and enigmatic psychological drama from Lynne Ramsay”
4/5 – The Guardian

“A film of external beauty in Ramsay’s visual language and sound design but it’s anchored by the internal work of her leading man”
Rogerebert.com

“A film for the ages”
Village Voice

SWEET COUNTRY
“Thornton’s direction, cinematography and screenplay could not be more impactful or ochre. The ensemble cast are excellent. And the frontier has seldom looked so forbidding”
5/5 – Irish Times

“It’s a stark, shocking movie, superbly shot by Thornton, who is both cinematographer and director: a film which feels at one level like a provocative exploitation picture such as Straw Dogs or Wake In Fright, and at another level like a classic studio western, with something of The Searchers or Red River”
5/5 – The Guardian

“It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of awesome natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake”
5/5 – Telegraph

“This occasionally savage drama is astutely driven to its court drama conclusion in a film which celebrates the mysterious, harsh landscape and those shimmering horizons of the Northern Territories in what is, aside from taut drama, a work of visionary cinematography. Recommended”
4/5 – RTE
“The spare, classical chase drama that ensues is seeded with barbed observations on colonialism, cultural erasure and rough justice, kept poetically succinct by Thornton’s lithe, soaring visual storytelling”
Variety

“A drama of imposing breadth and emotional depth”
The Hollywood Reporter

WONDER WHEEL
“Woody’s Allen’s period drama feels more like a stage play than a film – its claustrophobic atmosphere can be stifling. But Kate Winslet is a bonfire that burns through every scene.”
Rolling Stone

“Say what you want about the storyteller, but the stories speak for themselves, and Wonder Wheel proves they still have a lot to say.”
Indiewire

“It’s got movement and flow, it’s got a vibrant sunset look of honky-tonk nostalgia, and it’s got a bittersweet mood of lyrical despair that the film stays true to right up until the final note.”
Variety

“I’m not sure why we need a Coney Island that looks like Bertolucci’s The Conformist, but somehow it works, providing a level of visual interest that fascinates even when the dramatic interest lags.”
Rogerebert.com

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