Popular reviews

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★★ 85

  You thought that the discourse surrounding Three Billboards and Green Book was divisive? Let Dragged Across Concrete hold their tab, let alone their beers. Not rightfully so — no, indeed, this film is neither conservative, nor right-leaning, nor right-wing, nor alt-right — but it’s got enough provocation in it for keyboard warriors who didn’t really pay any attention to the film’s ideologies (and/or lack thereof), to crawl out of their crevices and have a field day.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 6

  Zahler's best movie yet, in its way his JACKIE BROWN, an exploration of race, police power, class, and crime. As idiosyncratic and weirdly literary as it is vile. Any questions you have about his actual worldview won't be answered but it's an ugly, bleak, and often very funny little bomb. A nearly perfect po-mo exploitation film.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★★ 23

  96

  A harrowing, vicious synthesis of S. Craig Zahler's tumultuous abilities as writer and director. Easily his greatest work in a filmography both praised and lambasted for its moral ambiguity and negligence of explicit political representation. There are no excuses present in Dragged Across Concrete, his latest. Rather, he doubles down on the thin, razor-sharp tight-rope balanced across an existential void, tiptoeing between depictions of race, class, systems of media, and a changing world of inclusive rhetoric. This movie doesn't endorse anyone, really, except maybe the victims of a haunted world, but then those caught in the crossfire are quickly forgotten. But still, it does depict the narrative of two police officers abusing their power in a fragile masculine sense,…

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★ 13

  Zahler's typically pungent, stylized exploitation and novelistic sense of off-kilter detail and patience is all present but I gotta confess some of the writing didn't do it for me. As a huge fan of Zahler (and having read enough interviews and novels of his to see some of this coming) I came to terms with the inherently reactionary premise of this long before I had the chance to see it and a movie having politics I disagree with is not a deal-breaker for me (especially if we're talking exploitation), but the glee with which this doles out cringe anti-PC troll humor while stacking plot conveniences that cynically force the audience to concede some legitimacy with the aggrieved worldview of these…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★ 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  Like someone get a terrific pulp novel and filmed every sentence like Oliveira did with Castelo Branco's Doomed Love.Everything after Gibson and Vaughn car started to follow the other criminals van post robbery is pretty much perfect. One of Zahler's trip to hells that so enriched by the amount detail. The one hour and half setting that up can be saggy on spots (and I could go without Jennifer Carpenter extended cameo), but it also has a lot of very good stuff in it specially acting wise (Gibson and Kittles are great as the leads).

  The film is loaded and that seems the bait near every critic has gone after. The first half is drawn on MAGA sign posts to…

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  Review by Matthew Christman ★★★★ 20

  Zahler gets that the visceral thrills of exploitation cinema don't land in our desensitized age unless they're placed in a shocking context, and for the bleary-eyed, over-entertained audience, "MAGA Prestige Drama" is about as shocking a context as you could imagine.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★½ 21

  62/100

  Zahler clearly wants to be his generation's Don Siegel, right down to inspiring heated debate about whether/to what extent he's a reactionary. I've mostly been a defender thus far, and it seems clear to me that some of the deliberately outrageous scenes here—e.g. Gibson and Vaughn's badass cops pretending they can't understand a (nude!) Latinx woman who speaks perfect English—constitute deliberate trolling of his critics. Depiction is not endorsement, etc. But it really does feel as if we're meant to identify primarily with the sense of self-righteous grievance expressed by our suspended "heroes," and perhaps to bridle at the happy ending that other characters receive. Zahler still complicates things enough to achieve plausible deniability, but I'm coming around to…

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  Review by Robert Franco 8

  a deeply complicated film and i will forever have to be careful about who i choose to discuss it with at risk of being grossly misunderstood lol

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★★ 16

  The ridiculous-yet-realist abrasiveness of the way that Dragged Across Concrete investigates & critiques society's cultural prejudices, is paradoxically so in-your-face that you might actually miss how deep its script digs, through a multitude of character-based explorations of mankind's politics (one of them, the most significant of the bunch, being a camouflaged but ultimate fuck-you @ the political preconceptions displayed by almost every other character). The narrative itself is quite A-to-B-to-C in terms of its simplicity, but it's exhibited with a fusion of long conversational sequences and quiet (until they get loud), slow, suspenseful, and horrifically authentic set pieces. This wraps the plot in a thick blanket of political examination and tempestuous gun violence, disguising a glacial contemplation on the state of…

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  Review by Todd Gaines ★★★★ 28

  Cops and Robbers 
  
  
  Do you know what I love about S Craig Zahler? He’s the real deal. He directs, writes the screenplay and composes all the music in Dragged Across Conncrete. He has original ideas. He casts who he wants to cast without giving a single fuck. He doesn’t give a flying fuck if his movie runs almost 3 hours, with a lot of the runtime chewed up by smart dialogue instead of non-stop action. He makes films his way, and I hope and pray he never changes.

  You must be in a certain mood to watch. As much as I adore Zahler’s work, even I, need to be in the right state of mind to fully enjoy. Mel Gibson…

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  Review by claire 👁️ diane ★ 20

  i really did go into the movie wanting to have a good time with it. and honestly my reaction to it is less ideological (though it is also that) than it is formal. i don't usually ever make critiques like this and i'm still letting it mull over and trying not to be overly critical because i came in with a bias from reading Zahler's interviews, but it just bored me to tears. it is as slow as bela tarr or tsai ming liang without any of the meditative qualities of those directors.

  i know the dialogue could be read as intentionally stylized, but it gives off strong self serious amateur theater vibes:

  example, paraphrasing:

  "where's my coffee?"
  "i spilled…

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★

  A great exploitation movie. Mel Gibson has never been better. I would not want to be friends with any of the key creative talent behind this movie, but none of them are inviting me to dinner anyway.