Popular reviews

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  Review by Andre de Nervaux ★★★★ 6

  Brutally heartbreaking, I was watching this on my laptop on the train and at many scenes I'm there crying my fucking eyes out and this guy goes "why are you crying are you okay?"

  I replied saying
  "It's cinema bro it's fucking cinema"

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★ 10

  There are a bunch of terrific performances, particularly from Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, and Jason Mitchell, but you've gotta sit through a very middling first hour to get to the part where it's worth it. And even when it is worth it, it's just building to the same type of climax any movie like this is building to, where the moral is "wow racism is awful and was a big cultural force in this era."

  I'm over watching black pain like this. There's merit to it for sure, but I'm just... exhausted by it. I want more black movies that aren't concerned with delivering a modern-day moral about race in old settings. I want more stories that let black…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 7

  I have said before, I believe, that I wish no one felt the need to tell these kinds of stories anymore.

  It's a condemnation upon us that our stories have to show a black man save the life of a white man before he even considers a black man a human being. It's a deeper condemnation that this is not only believable, not only likely the extent that was required, but also that these stories still get told, still have resonance, still seem relevant in this world. That Ronsel requires this explanation to make sense of any kindness from Jamie characterizes America. The fact that almost no progress has been made in the 70 years since when this narrative is…

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  Review by vee ★★★★ 2

  it's the small gestures that stay with me: henry adjusting laura's discarded shawl while she dances, florence turning her back so she doesn't have to watch her son leave, jamie putting a bouquet of flowers in the shower he builds, ronsel making his mother eat a chocolate bar without saving it for later. love, love, love seeping into the fabric of the film, fighting to stay alive despite everything.

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  Review by Lucy ★★★½

  dee rees is a FORCE of NATURE

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  Review by Josh Larsen ★★★★ 12

  The white farmers digging a grave for their father in the opening scene of Mudbound are about five feet down when they run into a problem: piles of bones suggest that the area has already been used as a cemetery of sorts for former slaves. It’s an inconvenience to them, but so much more for the movie, which at its best captures the way racial oppression has seeped into the very soil of America.

  Full review here.

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  Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★½

  50/100

  So heavily narrated at the outset that it's practically a Fotonovel, and while the torrent of expository verbiage eventually dies down (resurfacing here and there), that just leaves a big hole where the movie's raison d'être should be. Reliable reports indicate that the book devotes many pages to exploring Carey Mulligan's character, who barely registers onscreen; Rees' decision to shift focus makes sense, but that approach required a more radical deviation from the source material than she apparently wanted to make. (Or a much larger budget, in order to properly tackle World War II.) After an hour of lifeless historical/sociological place-setting, the film finally gets a welcome jolt of energy when the two families' sons return home from the…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★

  72

  An epic sliced down to two hours and some pocket change, and it hardly feels harshly truncated, emphasizing lean dynamics and painterly period detail over various asides. It would've excelled as a miniseries, but this will do.

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  Review by Dawson Joyce ★★★★★ 2

  An extremely powerful and provocative work that serves as one of Netflix's absolute best original films, Mudbound is an intense, tragic, poignant drama from co-writer and director Dee Rees that manages to be both incredibly epic and achingly intimate, with terrific performances, a brutally honest script, and gorgeous cinematography throughout.

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  Review by Chinar ★★★ 4

  This movie is like a novel you're supposed to read in your 9th grade English class and write essays and stuff about its themes of racism and PTSD, but you don't actually read it past the 10th page so you read the SparkNotes on it, so you realize why people think it's great and how it's important and stuff, but you honestly couldn't give two shits about anything that's happening.

  
  Perfect for the Academy.

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½

  You know what's one of the most infuriating things about this movie? That Netflix logo at the end. This film keeps promoting itself as a Netflix film, but I waited and waited and waited and waited and it never got premiered here on the platform. Its a lie!

  As for the film itself, it was pretty good. The movie never really had much of an impact on me, not until the end when the relationship between these two men plus a nation and a system that endured became stronger. All the performances are pretty good, especially Mary J Blige, Jason Mitchell and Garrett Hedlund as well as Mulligan. Once again, the script did not engage me as much, but the…

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  Review by Erik 🎼 ★★★★½ 1

  WHY did this not get nominated for best picture. how are you going to expand the category to 10 slots, and nominate only 9 films while you ignore this one. thats going to baffle me for my entire life.