Take Shelter Reviews
Top CriticA hallucinatory thriller anchored by a deeply resonant sense of unease.
When future film historians look back at the cultural fallout from America's financial collapse, 'Take Shelter' will be a key text. That is, if the storm doesn't sweep us all away.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Shannon wonderfully modulates Nichols' portrait of a man whose mind and life seem to unravel before our eyes.
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| Original Score: 4/4
There's a strong, unsettling sense of disease that runs through Take Shelter, the best drama of the year so far.
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| Original Score: A+
Shannon is astounding, playing a good man pushed to the brink of sanity, maybe beyond. He portrays a sense of quiet desperation -- a feeling recognizable to many.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Take Shelter is paced slowly and deliberately, which is necessary to make believable whatever is tormenting Curtis.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A work of hushed and persuasive emotional veracity.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The movies have long been mad about the onset of madness.
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| Original Score: A-
It's so stunningly effective at establishing a sense of dread that it's almost impossible to recommend it without reservations.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The chilling genius of "Take Shelter'' isn't that the threat is never specified but that it doesn't need to be.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A movie for this moment in time, this moment in our lives.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The movie makes you uncomfortable, but in a good way. Nichols has turned the current moment of American unease into a powerful metaphor.
The story of a man afflicted with fearful visions, Take Shelter is a film that's hitting the right apocalyptic trumpet call at the right time.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Taut, unsettling, haunting and powerful, "Take Shelter" stars Michael Shannon in a shattering performance as a man caught up in forces beyond his control.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The really chilling thing is how believable it is.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a film without suspense and with a slow-moving story that unfolds without surprise or embellishment.
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| Original Score: 2/4
A molar-grinding performance from Michael Shannon anchors this slow but ultimately haunting drama.
Here is a frightening thriller based not on special effects gimmicks but on a dread that seems quietly spreading in the land: that the good days are ending, and climate changes or other sinister forces will sweep away our safety.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Writer-director Jeff Nichols, whose previous film Shotgun Stories also starred Shannon, has the rare ability to think big and work small.
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| Original Score: A-
Nichols approaches his subject with thoughtful empathy, and while his themes are enormous - he's addressing no less than the state of our nation - he wisely underplays even the most important moments.
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| Original Score: 4/5
All in all, this is a movie that confronts its own hard challenges - and feels utterly, uncomfortably relevant in this new Age of Anxiety.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
It would be possible to appreciate Shannon's fabulous work in "Take Shelter'' far better if the filmmaker lost a quarter of the two-hour running time -- there are many overlong scenes that make this a needlessly tough sit.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Take Shelter" may be the most powerful American film I've seen this year.
It's ultimately a bleak vision, and a circumscribed one, but remarkable all the same, and proof that Mr. Nichols is ready for much bigger things.
It is a quiet, relentless exploration of the latent (and not so latent) terrors that bedevil contemporary American life, a horror movie that will trouble your sleep not with visions of monsters but with a more familiar dread.
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| Original Score: 4/5
There's a specificity to his film that roots it in the here and now, acknowledging not just free-floating unease but everyday fears over the price of gas and insurance co-pays.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Michael Shannon gives himself over completely to a complex role and leaves you shattered. Director Jeff Nichols throws curveballs, but his film is unique and unforgettable.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Writer-director Jeff Nichols builds his elegantly shot, weather-sensitive horror story in waves of tension that crest as if pulled by tempests.
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| Original Score: A-
Daring thematically and striking aesthetically, even as it pierces at the heart of the most relatable, everyday anxieties we all experience.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder -- a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as "something that's not right."
A trenchant portrait of America's poverty-line-treading middle class.
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| Original Score: 5/5
There's absolutely nothing affected about the film's perspective.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Nichols has a genius for making landscapes and everyday objects resonate like crazy, for nailing the texture of dread.
A riveting genre blend of thriller, domestic drama and supernatural horror propelled by a brilliant lead performance.
