Mud Reviews
For at least three-quarters of the way, this is a fine film, and one that kids and parents could see together.
There is an enchanted-fairy-tale aspect to Mud, but its bright, calm surface only barely disguises a strong, churning undercurrent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Toronto Star
Top CriticA modern fairy tale, steeped in the sleepy Mississippi lore of Twain and similar American writers, and with a heart as big as the river is wide.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Nichols has a strong feeling for the tactility of natural elements-water, wood, terrain, weather.
Nichols takes his time with the story, dwelling on how the boy is shaped by the killer's tragic sense of romance, yet the suspense holds.
"Mud" isn't just a movie. It's the firm confirmation of a career.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
"Mud" unfolds at its own pace, revealing its story in slivers. The performances are outstanding, especially from Sheridan, who plays tough, sweet, vulnerable and confused with equal conviction.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
The film is drenched in the humidity and salty air of a Delta summer, often recalling the musical, aphoristic cadences of Sam Shepard, who happens to appear in a supporting role.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A wonderful, piquant modern-day variation on "Huckleberry Finn.''
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
One of the most creatively rich and emotionally rewarding movies to come along this year.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It's a movie that holds out hope for the movies' future.
Mr. Nichols's voice is a distinctive and welcome presence in American film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Nichols' wild narrative tributaries all eventually intersect, and at no time does he let one's attention stall.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
What you do need to know is that the acting is top-tier all the way. McConaughey, on a career roll, is magnificent.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Nichols lovingly sketches his characters and their world; he takes his time doing so, but it's a pleasure to watch the small interactions and the humid reality of secret coves and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets and seedy hotels.
Writer/director Jeff Nichols creates richly realized characters in a tale that moves like a cottonmouth viper, advancing slowly until it strikes with sudden violence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
With "Mud," Jeff Nichols announces his intention to do it all. He just may yet.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Mud is steeped in a sense of place, and the people inhabiting it. Southern. Superstitious. Suspenseful. Sublime.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Mud is a lyrical coming-of-age tale that feels like a Mark Twain story in a contemporary setting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
McConaughey brings to the film a heartfelt and beautifully realized angst. And Witherspoon is excellent as a woman who can't help being who she is, regardless of any pain that may cause.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Once writer and director Jeff Nichols' film about love, lies and loss gets going, it never really stops.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
[Nichols] has a rare ability to root his archetypal Southern fables in rich observational detail. They remain tangibly specific but take on the larger resonances of folklore.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The film's guilelessness in stoking classic themes, folklore and paradigms in American culture would be absurdly self-conscious if Nichols didn't have such an original voice as a storyteller.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
You come away from Mud fondly remembering those two boys, especially Ellis, who has taken his first steps toward adulthood and discovers it suits him just fine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
There's something old-fashioned about Mud, but if you allow yourself to settle into its leisurely pace, it will reward you.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
A modern-day homage to the settings and characters popularized in some of Twain's best loved works.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
McConaughey, of course, is excellent.
It's hard to believe Nichols thinks he can get away with all this and harder still to believe he does.
The story of a sympathetic fugitive who forges a bond with two teenage boys near a mighty river down south, Mud is shot through with traditional qualities of American literature and drama.
The most immediately involving film that I've seen in a good long while.
There's an argument to be made that there's a calculated degree of cliché to this sweet, Southern-fried fairytale, that Nichols is paying tribute here to his more mainstream inspirations.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
What sounds like Huckleberry Finn on the page, however, ends up like a stock melodrama onscreen.
Confidently expanding his inquiry into the essence of American masculinity, Nichols' latest pressure-cooker pastoral conjures a wily figure of endangered Southern chivalry.
