White Lightnin' Reviews
Top CriticThere's a crazy-dirty energy to White Lightnin' that's rarely seen in films, a raw beauty and awfulness that's both scary and exciting.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Empire Magazine
Dominic Murphy's pseudo-biopic is as visually assured as it is audacious, but behind the slickly edited imagery, the debutant's storytelling is exposed by shallow characterisation.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
This debut British feature weaves sundry biographical details into an awkward cross-hatch of oblique celluloid portrait and backwoods horror thriller.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Film4
From its bleakly comic beginning to its fire-and-brimstone ending, this artful trailer-trash quasi-biopic will set your heart pounding and your feet tapping.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Guardian [UK]
If you thought Deliverance was too subtle, too refined, too delicate, and that the hillbillies in it were far too much like characters from Jane Austen, then this is for you.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Little White Lies
Seething with blighted fervour and over-ripe with religious wrath, the wild, elemental imagery generates something truly disturbing. With its strange religious overtones and inevitably fitful conclusion, White Lightnin' is elusive and bleak.
| Original Score: 4/5
Sky Movies
Former commercials director Dominic Murphy has conjured up a brutally compelling tale distinguished by a manically unhinged performance from British actor Edward Hogg.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Total Film
A psychedelic, sepia-toned horror show, touring the dark corners of his mind and those of the white trash world in which he lives.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Uncut Magazine [UK]
Not your conventional music biopic. In fact, it's increasingly hard to know what's fact or fiction about White's life as Murphy's film unfolds.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Daily Mirror [UK]
A surreal but searing biopic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Financial Times
In White Lightnin', style and content meet, blend and writhe in the memory, a haunting nightmare.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
ViewLondon
There are flashes of brilliance in the direction, but the film's excesses make it difficult to watch at times and the end result is somewhat exhausting.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Shadows on the Wall
Loosely based on a real person, this unhinged drama gets increasingly lurid and grisly as it progresses. It's riveting, inventive filmmaking, but not remotely easy to watch.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Scotsman
An amusingly nutty aberration of the traditional follow-your-dreams story arc.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
