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Critics Consensus: While conventional in plot, Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a visually poetic film that pays homage to the New Hollywood directors of the 1970s and promises big things from director David Lowery.
Critic Consensus: While conventional in plot, Ain't Them Bodies Saints is a visually poetic film that pays homage to the New Hollywood directors of the 1970s and promises big things from director David Lowery.
All Critics (125) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (97) | Rotten (28)
If it is a homage, this is an intelligent and accomplished one, a conscientious matching-up of style and substance.
A slow, banjo-string-tight thriller ... Bodies gets under your skin and stays there.
This Sundance-sanctioned, love-on-the-run melodrama is indie filmmaking of a deliberately timeless sort.
A lyrical modern Western that casts a contemporary but un-jaded eye on the romantic mythology of outlaw couples.
Writer-director David Lowery strains for poetry at every turn, and only the strain registers.
Lowery has a lyrical style of storytelling that is delicate and subtle yet suffused with emotion and atmosphere. It's gentle and pointed at the same time.
...an often excessively deliberate endeavor that's clearly been inspired by the work of Terrence Malick...
I've absolutely nothing wrong with movies wanting to be tone poems, but the lack of urgency in the plot really hindered me from getting invested in the story.
The story is as simple as it gets, but this is closer to sense experience than narrative, the kind of pleasure that sweeps you up and sets you down somewhere new.
The problem with the film, written and directed by David Lowery, is that it's tepidly drawn, with molasses-like pacing and an anticlimactic ending that does little to keep the audience invested.
Dark, dreamy and romantic, this is a slow-burning delight full of quiet yearning and brittle passion.
In the end, you can't help but be won over by the combination of matter-of-fact grittiness, proverbial wisdom, and faded backdrops for fading lives.
A sad, melancholy Bonnie & Clyde-like crime drama that clearly borrows from Malick, and it is nice to see the way that Lowery approaches his narrative even if it is quite conventional and worth seeing more for its strong performances than by what he actually wants to tell.
Super Reviewer
Dark and lyrical to a fault, Ain't Them Bodies Saints is an exercise of style over substance, but is elevated by fantastic performances from Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Ben Foster, and Keith Carradine. The tone of this western sets up a tragic story about consequences and family as an outlaw tries to make it home to his family, and that hopelessness is reflected in the (now cliche) backdrop of a rural Texas setting.
Simple, beautiful and achingly tender. Very good Film! Good story which needs some touching up, but the acting is first rate. It is a character study, a study in melancholy told in real, human terms and not in movie terms. And maybe that is its only flaw, that truth be told, real life is less dramatic and more grimy than make-believe. This is another triumph for Rooney Mara who is excellent as a strong, young woman who desires a better life and a man who can't get it for her. There's great irony in the way events turn out for her and it's all totally believable. I was also impressed with Casey Affleck's performance as her lover and small time criminal. Perhaps the film veers too closely at times toward stylish vagueness and too far from the broken heart of the story. But there is no denying this is a serious, authored work of art. The tale of an outlaw who escapes from prison and sets out across the Texas hills to reunite with his wife and the daughter he has never met.
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