Tyrannosaur Reviews

A stunning and memorable debut.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Tyrannosaur is cinema that scars the soul - you'll only want to see it once, but once is enough.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Those angling for a "feel-bad" bummer won't be disappointed.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

The movie is cruelly frank about the ways damage cascades down to the powerless, but while it's not for the fainthearted (or for animal lovers), rewards are there.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Considine equates the denizens of a Leeds housing estate with caged beasts and Mullan's performance is beautifully calibrated - a snarling, dangerous surface hiding the loyalty and affection which can be found underneath.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

It sounds like an exercise in miserabilism, but Considine extracts black comedy, compassion, and dignity from his downtrodden characters and their blighted setting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Considine makes painterly use of the canvases that are Mullan's and Colman's faces, deep pools of ache, in different stages of their descent to a breaking point.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

The principals are superb, with Mullan and Colman doing a masterful job of inhabiting their separate but equal prisons.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

You won't find two finer performances in recent times than those by Mullan and Colman, who in a perfect world would each have received Oscar nominations this week.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

A searing drama buoyed by exquisite performances and a keen understanding from its first-time director of the power of the absence of dialog.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

If the script ultimately seems a bit extreme (are there no immediate consequences for Joseph's tantrums or the criminal outbursts of Hannah's abusive husband?), it's often surprisingly successful in pushing the limits of British kitchen-sink drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

[Mullan and Colman are] the anchors of the film's scary, tightly wound world, in which everyone's spring is dangerously close to being sprung.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

This isn't the kind of movie that even has hope enough to contain a message. There is no message, only the reality of these wounded personalities.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

A relentlessly-grim yarn revolving around a tragically-flawed trio being slowly swallowed whole by the emotional quicksand of a blue-collar wasteland where there really aren't any winners.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Don't be afraid of the movie's grim facade: this is an uplifting journey worth taking.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Amidst excruciating violence, the storyline is not as strong as the harrowingly indelible performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10

Like a bruise, black and blue and more deeply felt than it initially seems.

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The performances carry the film and occasionally lift it beyond its kitchen-sink lower-depths doldrums.

Full Review | Original Score: B

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

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