Wildcat: reviews

What the critics say average 5.5 from 15 outlets

• 8.0 Los Angeles TimesRobert Abele It’s a soulful, pointed and unconventional grappling with the mysteries of the deeply Catholic, norm-shattering Georgia native’s life and work. Read
• 7.5 Chicago Sun-TimesRichard Roeper “Wildcat” is an inventive and haunting mood piece with a number of memorable scenes. Read
• 6.7 The PlaylistAnkit Jhunjhunwala “Wildcat” should provide interest to audiences that have read and enjoyed O’Connor’s work and might even spur new readers to seek her stories out. Read
• 6.7 The Austin ChronicleKimberley Jones For neophytes, there’s still much to enjoy – cinematographer Steve Cosen’s painterly framing, exuberant scenery chewing (Linney makes a meal out of one vignette’s rotted teeth) – but the thematic resonance between story and storyteller gets a little lost when you’re only working off the reenactments’ CliffsNotes. Read
• 6.3 Slant MagazineChris Barsanti By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent. Read
• 6.3 Roger EbertChristy Lemire Ethan Hawke attempts to breathe new life into the biopic structure with mixed results in “Wildcat.” What is certain is that he’s drawn a rich and multilayered performance from his daughter, Maya Hawke, in the starring role. Read
• 6.3 LarsenOnFilmJosh Larsen Maya Hawke, the director’s daughter with Uma Thurman, plays O’Connor. Her performance is one of the movie’s strengths. Read
• 6.0 Total FilmMatt Maytum Ultimately, though, the combination of handsome visuals and assemblage of sketchy moments leave it feeling more like a museum piece, offering impressions over a gratifying narrative experience. Read
• 5.8 IndiewireSiddhant Adlakha “Wildcat” is too tame in its portrayal of suffering to let its Catholic undertones sing or take powerful cinematic form, resulting in a work where paradoxes are half-baked dilemmas that seem too conveniently solved, and life itself is something that happens far off-screen. Read
• 5.0 ColliderNate Richard For as much care and passion that the Hawkes put into Wildcat, the film never knows what it wants to be or even what audience it wants to be speaking to. Read
• 5.0 VarietyPeter Debruge It’s emotionally exhausting, but audiences come away with a sense of her legacy, as well as an appreciation for the adversity she faced (and, to a lesser degree, a sense of the criticism that has been leveled against her). Read
• 4.0 The GuardianCharles Bramesco Ethan Hawke has good taste, and his past undertakings as director have affirmed that, but the biopic’s big built-in pitfall – the psychologically facile connect-the-dots between a figure’s life and works – swallows up his perceptible esteem for O’Connor. Read
• 4.0 New York TimesBrandon Yu Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world. Read
• 3.5 Paste MagazineKatarina Docalovich Regrettably, a gross number of missteps overshadow the Hawkes’ good intentions with this film. Read
• 1.6 The Film StageEthan Vestby One hopes Wildcat can disappear into thin air so that it doesn’t have to weigh on Hawke’s legacy. Read