Popular reviews

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★

  brain-melting charisma was so cool. the movies should really consider bringing that back.

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★

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

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★★

  A rocket ride through the world of men and all the laws, written or otherwise, that regulate it. Every bit with Costner and the kid is a marvel. The stuff inside the trailer can be more staid despite some wonderful back and forth between Eastwood and Dern, but the intercut between lawless and order is essential to what the movie is doing and it moves very strong from one to the other. Good to know this still makes me cry hard as it has been a few years. My pick for greatest movie made in Hollywood after the studio system collapsed.

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  Review by Sean Fennessey ★★★★½ 18

  Somewhere along the way, this became a forgotten classic. It's the final film in Costner's golden period and the first movie Eastwood made after his Unforgiven triumph. It earned $130 million and ruled HBO for years. (Somehow not a single person drafted it in our 1993 Movie Draft episode. I don't think it even came up? I think I just forgot.) I've seen it at least a dozen times, and as a kid whose dad had just moved out when I was roughly the same age as Philip in the film, it resonated deeply. The apex of Costner's quiet cool.

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  Review by Glenn Heath Jr. ★★★★★

  Men trying to be fathers, boys trying to be sons. What a wonderful film.

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  Review by eddie ★★★★★

  hell no, phillip. good size for a boy your age

  most of the runtime consists of intercutting costner teaching a jehova's witness youth about outlaw moralism with clint the texas ranger fighting off the governer's criminologist (laura dern) and the fbi's sharpshooter (bradley whitford), who were assigned to assist his highway manhunt, which is... perfect. eastwood is a master of balancing the melodramatic and the procedural, which makes the clash of the two at the climax that much more painful. whitford looking down the scope, followed by a series of reaction shots that seem to punctuate the dramatic thread of each character. buzz asks butch "are you bad?", and this ironic question has as much weight as henry fonda's "by jing, that's all there is to it. right and wrong" in young mr. lincoln. myth-making in the gray area.

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  Review by Willow Maclay ★★★★½ 5

  "In Eastwood's filmography knowing how to use a gun and the consequences of that knowledge are addressed in the hands of fathers and their sons, whether they be surrogate or natural born. The most famous example of this is in Unforgiven (1992) where William Munny (Clint Eastwood) consoles “the Schofield Kid” (Jaimz Woolvett) after he kills a man for the first time. The Kid is struggling to grasp what he has just done. He's in disbelief, chugging whiskey and holding back tears before Munny utters a few words on killing that resonate beyond Unforgiven and are applicable to many of Eastwood's films. “It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he's got...and all he's ever…

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  Review by Will Sloan

  Cry Macho.

  Leonard Maltin’s two-star review states: “Something new in screen entertainment: A manhunt movie with no urgency and no suspense.” He is correct, but wrong to think that this is a problem.

  If you had any doubt that the director is the author of a movie, consider that this is written by John Lee Hancock.

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★

  After tearing down the western in Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood decided to do some mythmaking of his own, about an outlaw instead of a lawman. His mastery of relaxed pacing makes this a pleasure to watch, but not without darkness - the late sequence with Costner's Butch Haynes coming harrowingly close to gunning down a family In-Cold-Blood-style is a great illustration of how heroes sometimes (maybe inevitably) end up failing us.

  But my favorite part of the movie is T.J. Lowther as Butch's 8-year-old "hostage" Phillip. Movie history is full of precocious, hyperverbal youngsters who talk like grownups and are able to fully articulate all of their complex emotions in a way that adults aren't even able to in the real…

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  Review by Christof88 ★★★★½ 8

  *A Perfect World* was released a year after Clint Eastwood's Oscar triumph with *Unforgiven*. In this film, he confronts his demons by making a powerful statement against violence. It serves as his definitive Western, and for the remainder of the '90s, Eastwood shifted his focus to crime thrillers.

  *A Perfect World* stands out as the best among them. One of the film's brilliant decisions is casting Kevin Costner as the outlaw, a departure from his usual roles. Costner, known for his virtuous portrayals, such as Elliott Ness in *The Untouchables* and the sympathetic frontiersman in *Dances with Wolves*, takes on a more complex character here.

  Costner plays an outlaw with a heart of gold. Although he shares a warm chemistry…

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 21

  “A Perfect World” is a movie made masterful by its flaws. 

  Clint Eastwood’s crime drama about an escaped convict (Kevin Costner) that takes a young boy hostage fluctuates with a jerking suddenness of tone between moments of comedy and trauma. 

  The unevenness is one of Eastwood’s recurring late career quirks, but in “World,” the imbalance functions to further the tinderbox tenacity of the setup. Working class dad Costner is constantly on the verge of deceiving even himself that he is the mastermind of an amiable family road trip, rather than of a violent crime. 

  The pairing of two notable Western genre actor-directors in “World” cannot have escaped audiences of the time; so soon after Costner’s sweeping the Oscars for “Dances…

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  Review by Matheus Fiore ★★★★★

  Texto originalmente escrito para a newsletter Locadora Fiore. Leia a análise completa aqui.

  "Haynes mostra o céu e o inferno para o garoto, e sua prova de maturação é discernir um do outro. Entender que pessoas são mais difíceis do que “bom” ou “mau” e que até quem amamos é capaz das coisas mais aterrorizantes que podemos imaginar. Como o oficial da lei que é, o xerife Red é um dos personagens mais interessantes do Eastwood. É o cara que sabe que o sistema está quebrado e aprofunda sua convicção disso a cada dia que sai pra trabalhar. “Eu não sei mais de nada”, chega a dizer Red. O xerife, tal qual Clint, sabe que o mundo é uma merda,…