Wild Horse Nine

James (Schaffrillas)4.0

Deeply melancholy and contemplative but also extremely funny, with a ridiculous amount of great joke setups and payoffs. Starts teetering a bit in the third act but ultimately lands the plane (in Venice). Malkovich is impossible to look away from

Sean Fennessey

I like when a director’s body of work is a series of recurrences, recitations, and redefinitions. This is one of the best “I’m still working through this dynamic” examples in some time.

JackFolla4.0

I can understand most of the criticism I’ve read about this movie, especially the idea that, perhaps for the first time, Martin McDonagh loves his characters a little too much. By tackling such a delicate subject through two characters who are, at least in theory, so deeply flawed, he ends up being far too forgiving of them, risking a certain trivialization of an issue that, especially considering what we still see in the news every day, remains painfully relevant and deserves much more attention.That being said, even though I love directors who know how to surprise me, and even though here McDonagh pretty much mixes together everything he’s done in his previous films without really bringing anything new to the table, I couldn’t take my eyes off a single little facial expression from these wonderful actors. All of them serving a razor sharp screenplay, brilliant dialogue, and writing that manages to be melancholic, funny, and biting all at once.On top of that, the emotional finale, which finally focuses on the small human drama unfolding before us rather than trying to deliver some grand historical moral, almost makes you forget all the little flaws in the way everything was set up earlier.This might be Martin McDonagh’s least successful movie. And yet, I’d pay good money to have a movie of this quality in theaters every single week. Perhaps that’s the greatest compliment I could possibly give him.