Midnight Special's reviews
Media reviews
Los Angeles Times
Midnight Special announces the arrival of a filmmaker in total control of his technique as well as our emotions. A bravura science-fiction thriller that explores emotional areas like parenthood and the nature of belief, it's a riveting genre exercise as well as something more.
Roger Ebert
Midnight Special respects your intelligence, letting you come to its themes emotionally instead of narratively. It is a breathtaking display of visual storytelling, confidently rendered by someone who understands the power of cinema.
Hitfix
This is a very raw, sad, and beautiful film about faith and fatherhood, and it feels just as grounded and big-hearted as the other films Nichols has made.
Variety
Nichols? impressively restrained yet limitlessly imaginative fourth feature takes its energy from an ensemble of characters who hold fast to their convictions, even though their beliefs remain shrouded in mystery for much of the journey.
The Hollywood Reporter
Midnight Special confirms Nichols' uncommon knack for breathing dramatic integrity and emotional depth into genre material.
The A.V. Club
Shannon, best known for playing weirdos and crazies, is uniquely good at playing restrained everymen, and he inhabits the role of Roy as a man of unspoken internal conflicts and complicated feelings.
Entertainment Weekly
As father and son speed toward some doomsday reckoning, Nichols keeps us guessing in a way that evokes "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." Midnight Special is a more modest, more enigmatic film than that one was, but it?s no less gripping.
Rolling Stone
Go with it. Let Nichols turn your head around. He sure as hell will. One caveat: Nichols drops you into the action, no backstory road map. What you see is what you get. Luckily, what you get is extraordinary.
Time Out
Midnight Special is a movie worth believing in. It's an alternative to the assembly line that turns hot young directors into purveyors of the latest shade of superhero spandex. Little here feels like science or fiction but sci-fi is exactly what this is, from the heart and out of this world.
Fotogramas
Unusual film (...) The way Nichols dispenses information keeps you guessing until the emotional dimension of history is gaining ground. It's a film that leaps into the void without a net, assuming without fear of consequences.
El Mundo
E.T. go back home. (...) Such magnetic and indispensable as joyously disconcerting martian thing. (...) Nichols raises a cloudy film so naive. So sad, so bright.
USA Today
If E.T. was human, wore swim goggles and read Superman comics by flashlight, he?d be the 8-year-old boy at the center of the heartfelt, lo-fi sci-fi spectacular Midnight Special.