Tyrannosaur Reviews
Top CriticTrue, the stars are very good at what they do, but so what?
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Like a bruise, black and blue and more deeply felt than it initially seems.
The performances carry the film and occasionally lift it beyond its kitchen-sink lower-depths doldrums.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Combustible Celluloid
Considine lays out his story in little blocks that seem to begin as the characters enter; no one ever seems to be living between the scenes, and nothing springs to life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
It is the kind of film that leaves you limp, exhausted and feeling battered by the end. But its wrenching performances make the beating worth weathering.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Filmcritic.com
a dire, depressing effort
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Propelled by male rage but softened by Considine's big-hearted understanding of his characters, this bruising slice of urban life rewards our patience.
The characters are trapped, suffocated, pushed through a story that gives them very little room or time to figure themselves out, and that finally turns their feelings into the wan stuff of fable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Considine's intense film isn't easy viewing, and surely isn't pretty, but his actors are remarkable.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
AV Club
Tyrannosaur sounds like a particularly extreme work of British working-class miserablism, but Considine and his cast have no use for comfortable distance created by cliché.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Tyrannosaur is British miserabilism at its most numbingly brutal and blunt.
ColeSmithey.com
[VIDEO] Actor Paddy Considine turns writer/director with an overwrought drama burdened with the earmarks of dramatist trying too hard to make a mark, if not a lasting impression.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Hope? Redemption? Catharsis? Tyrannosaur offers such possibilities, but the trip getting there is brutal, indeed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Birmingham Mail
As much as Tyrannosaur is well made, bleakly photographed and knowingly directed with an appreciable lack of Hollywood gloss, it still feels like it's of little use to anybody with a brain.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Radio Times
Mullan plays his unsympathetic character with power and magnetism, but it is Colman's terrific performance that sticks in the mind, a powerhouse portrayal of one of modern-day suburbia's many unseen, unheard victims.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Birmingham Post
A well-made and brilliantly acted film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Sight and Sound
Not without its flaws, Tyrannosaur is an auspicious start, and if Considine gains confidence from it, even better may lie ahead.
Observer [UK]
It's a brave, tough, truly compassionate film that threatens to bite any hand of comfort held out to it prematurely.
Daily Mirror [UK]
Some of the gritty realism is hard to take, but the commitment to souls in trouble is heartwarming.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
This is London
It's art, not fun, be warned. Actually, it has to be said the portrait it so fondly gives of life in Leeds is repellent: drunken, abusive, indolent, violent, and just ugly in every possible respect.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
