Tyrannosaur Reviews
Top CriticThe 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
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
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
Paddy Considine's first feature as writer-director comes off like a playwriting exercise, with familiar characters taking every opportunity to wage messy, cathartic arguments or exhume traumatic memories.
The acting - particularly the moving performance of Olivia Colman as a battered spouse living in a grim corner of Leeds, England - is fierce and committed. So why doesn't its impact linger?
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
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
If only Considine was not so intent on trying to shock us. He succeeds at that, all right - but in doing so he fails his film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
True, 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
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
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
Tyrannosaur is British miserabilism at its most numbingly brutal and blunt.
Hope? Redemption? Catharsis? Tyrannosaur offers such possibilities, but the trip getting there is brutal, indeed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's not a particularly deep or unique statement, but Considine howls it with sincerity and conviction.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Both Mullan and Marsan are expectedly stellar, but it's Colman, a performer better known for TV comedies, who gives the film its deeply moving soul.
This is an intense exploration of the corrosive effects of human violence. And its eventual glimmer of redemption is entirely earned, not artificial or consoling.
Brit thesp Paddy Considine makes a strong writing-helming feature debut with "Tyrannosaur," recycling the same cast, characters and setup he used for his 2008 award-winning short "Dog Altogether."
