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Critics Consensus: Slow West serves as an impressive calling card for first-time writer-director John M. Maclean -- and offers an inventive treat for fans of the Western.
Critic Consensus: Slow West serves as an impressive calling card for first-time writer-director John M. Maclean -- and offers an inventive treat for fans of the Western.
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All Critics (131) | Top Critics (26) | Fresh (121) | Rotten (10)
Slow West crescendos into a bravura shootout between all the involved parties, and it's as gorgeous, nihilistic, and brutally sad as the rest of the film.
Essentially an old-school Western with some interesting tweaks, Slow West -- the debut feature from musician-turned-filmmaker John Maclean -- is a simple story told, yes, slowly. But it offers a bang-up finish.
There's more to the story than meets the bull's eye in Slow West, a brainy and genre-defying western by newcomer John Maclean.
It's all of 84 minutes. But when it's done, you know you've seen something.
Writer-director John Maclean insists at every opportunity that the American west teemed with brutality and that every positive myth about the region was built on a lie, yet he doesn't deliver this familiar revisionist history with much force.
Maclean's film is a wonderfully dreamy, if meandering, take on the western. Like all movies that use their fantastic surroundings, Slow West is best seen on a big screen.
It shows the rewards of taking the road less traveled, relishing the telling of the tale as much as the tale itself.
Kodi Smit-McPhee and Michael Fassbender, both physically and in the way they inhabit their roles, dovetail excellently.
Slow West harks back to its cowboy roots and its noir inspiration for its strong moral core. Every evil act committed is paid for in a breathtaking final act.
Neither clever enough to be a good revisionist Western nor entertaining enough to be a satisfying genre exercise.
[Jay Cavendish] seeks to move beyond the boundaries of basic survival, a trait that Silas eventually learns in this slick and often heart-warming tale of unlikely paths crossing.
There are lessons about love to be learned, bloody shootouts, a sweet fur coat worn by a heartless bounty hunter, and a grim montage of still shots for everyone that meets their demise
This attempt of an arthouse Western movie is only 80 minutes long but feels like two hours. It's okay to tell a story slowly but you should never make your audience feel as if they just wasted their time. It doesn't help that the humor feels so out of place and random even the editing makes other scenes unintentionally funny. Some sequences are beautifully shot, but the pointlessly bittersweet ending really makes you want to forget you watched this. What was everyone involved thinking?
Super Reviewer
Every now and again comes a film wherein all the characters are chasing something they want, and often that thing needn't be much of anything. So is the case here where we are introduced to several different types of folks, all in search of the same thing, in this case $2000, which may not seem like a lot now but back then was quite a lot. A nicely told tale.
A more than impressive debut for John Maclean, who revisits the Western genre in an intense story about a long gone time of violence and death, showing the West in its raw brutality but with a lot of dark humor, and backed by a beautiful cinematography and great sound design.
A bold, exciting, fun and wonderfully original directional debut from Director, John M. Maclean. Maclean shoots like Wes Anderson and has the Coen Brothers gritty storytelling. A fresh, darkly comic and pistol-whipping western with heart and great characters. Kodi Smit-McPhee and Michael Fassbender are absolutely excellent. They have a charming and unique chemistry to them. I really enjoyed this movie its colorful edge, beautiful landscapes and compelling story. A sharp and vastly enjoyable movie.
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