Intensely colourful, but somehow soulless.
Comment
03/11/08
The Butcher Boy (1997)
79 %
Reviews Counted: 57 Fresh: 45 Rotten:12 Average Rating: 7.5/10
Runtime: 2 hrs
Synopsis: Director Neil Jordan expertly blends fantasy and reality in the saga of Francie Brady (Eamonn Owens), an energetic and imaginative boy whose bleak existence in a small 1960s Ireland town eventually drives him to drastic measures. With his friend Joe (Alan Boyle), Francie escapes into a... [More]
Genre: Dramas
Starring: Eamonn Owens, Stephen Rea, Alan Boyle, Sean McGinley, Fiona Shaw
Director: Neil Jordan
Screenwriter: Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan
Producer: Redmond Morris, Stephen Woolley
Composer: Elliot Goldenthal
Screenwriter: Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan
Producer: Redmond Morris, Stephen Woolley
Composer: Elliot Goldenthal
Reviews
Top Critic
Though the movie sometimes looks as if the authentic Irish wit, colour and blarney has been filtered through the sensibility of a Buñuel or Polanski, Jordan never allows the surreal/expressionist aspects to dominate.
06/24/06
Top Critic
Despite the quality of the finished product, the combination of brutal story, repertory players and small scale visuals makes it difficult to work out who the audience will be.
01/01/00
Top Critic
This potentially disturbing film is handled as a crazy, unstoppable black comedy.
01/01/00
Owens' remarkable, high-pitched performance and Jordan's lush, visionary style are perfectly suited to the material.
03/11/08
Director Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe adapted McCabe's novel for this bland 1998 shocker that fails miserably as satire, character study, and anything else it might have aspired to.
03/11/08
A horrific tale of madness and abuse told with pop-eyed color and giddy humor.
02/28/07
The film almost immediately loses the major asset of the novel: its language. Possibly a quarter of the movie is incomprehensible to the American ear.
01/19/06
Neil Jordan's most accomplished and brilliant film to date, Butcher Boy is satisfying as faithful literary adaptation and inense cinematic experience that brings to mind in theme Kubrick's equally brilliant Cloakwork Orange.
12/24/05
The film's horrific conclusion is as uncompromising as it is inevitable and, unfortunately, ever-more topical.
12/06/05
The Butcher Boy manages to present scenes of violence and despair within a carnival atmosphere, yet still touches us, largely due to Jordan's assured hand in directing this complex tale.
04/09/05
The Butcher Boy reveals how a soul's future, in the early stages of development, is highly influenced by love, or the lack of it.
01/15/05
I find myself in an embarrassing position: I think this is a great movie, but I’m not sure.
08/07/04
So interesting, so compelling and so devastating, that the old idea is fresh and new again.
05/22/03
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