Reviews for this film from our members:
- Marco Albanese @ Stanze di Cinema [Italian]
- Excerpt: E’ cinema mortuario quello di Wells, senza un punto di vista, senza uno sguardo, senza un’idea del mondo.
- José Arce @ LaButaca.net [Spanish]
- Excerpt: La obra de Tracy Letts salta de Broadway a Hollywood con un resultado de intensidad volátil y en ocasiones demasiado desatada. Aún así, una película emocionalmente tremenda coronada por un reparto emocionalmente tremendo. Preparaos para el calor de Oklahoma.
- Edwin Arnaudin @ Ashvegas
- Excerpt: Introduced in a fluid, natural fashion, the Westons comprise a fascinating array of character types, played with precision by a crackerjack cast. Letts reveals just enough about each person to make the dynamic a heightened yet believable mix and wisely saves the juicier bits for those who can handle the assignment.
- Luke Bonanno @ DVDizzy.com
- Excerpt: When the film hits its stride during a dinner scene where everyone’s character emerges, it is electric. Unfortunately, it is more often simply a fine, dialogue-driven family drama, each relative neatly assigned a problem and asked to combat it while in the presence of the unwell, judgmental, larger than life host.
- Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat @ SpiritualityandPractice.com
- Excerpt: Drama that brings us face-to-face with the toxins that can destroy marriages and family life.
- Daniel Carlson @ Pajiba
- Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: while the director gives his film a lived-in quality, he hasn’t succeeded in making us care about the lives subsisting within.
- [New – 2/13/14] | Edwin Davies @ A Mighty Fine Blog
- Excerpt: By attempting to open the play out, moving scenes around and staging conversations in locations that are outside the immediate vicinity of the house, the film loses a lot of the sweaty intensity that gives the play its power. The screenplay, which is by Letts’ himself, retains most of the words of the stage version, but the atmosphere is totally missing.
- Carlos del Río @ El rincón de Carlos del Río [Spanish]
- Excerpt: Gran reparto, pero no gran película.
- Susan Granger @ www.susangranger.com
- Excerpt: Abandonment disguised as holiday fare – this barbed, darkly comic drama is filled with challenging, revelatory outbursts of recrimination and regret.
- Mark Hobin @ Fast Film Reviews
- Excerpt: In the hands of lesser actors, this might leave the audience emotionally cold, but watching this group of incredible acting talent work together is a joy. This ensemble meshes as a well oiled machine.
- Travis Hopson @ Punch Drunk Critics
- Excerpt: Despite terrific performances, August: Osage County is basically a two-hour bitch fest with so many ugly reveals it strains the limits of credibility.
- Blake Howard @ Graffiti With Punctuation
- Excerpt: Letts’ script attracted actors of the highest calibre, Wells fostered brilliance from Streep and Roberts (and the whole cast really). It’s not easy to watch a family implode but August: Osage County shows us that some families need to.
- Jeremy Kibler @ The Artful Critic
- Excerpt: Sliding between cutting remarks, theatrics, and pain, “August: Osage County” could be an unendurable downer to the majority, but limited to its performances and Letts’ literate, razor-sharp words, it can be an upper.
- Kristin Dreyer Kramer @ NightsAndWeekends.com
- James Madden @ Film Blerg
- Ross Miller @ Thoughts On Film
- Excerpt: This star-studded melodrama works on the strength of its cast and the always emotional, frequently hilarious and often achingly truthful screenplay by Tracy Letts.
- Simon Miraudo @ Quickflix
- Pat Mullen @ Cinemablographer
- Excerpt: Review from the Toronto International Film Festival. Meryl Streep outdoes herself. (Again.)
- Jason Pirodsky @ Expats.cz
- Excerpt: The Big Chill meets The Celebration meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in director John Wells’ August: Osage County, an abrasive portrait of a dysfunctional family reunion that seems to simmer on low despite all the histrionics up on the screen, but eventually gets right under your skin.
- Jamie S. Rich @ Oregon Live
- Excerpt: Though maybe known better to moviegoers as the mind behind such perverse pleasures as “Bug” and “Killer Joe,” Letts shows his range here, writing a raw, bitter drama that hits at the heart of where his characters live.
- Jonathan Richards @ www.jonrichardsplace.com
- Excerpt: An uneven movie at once too dispersed and too intimate to capture the theatrical lightning
- Jerry Roberts @ Armchair Cinema
- Excerpt: What did we do to deserve these people?
- Tom Santilli @ Examiner.com
- Excerpt: Some films have great casts and carry with them a great expectation for success. But few films assemble such superstars and actually utilize them fully.
- Cole Smithey @ ColeSmithey.com
- Excerpt: Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play loses an hour-and-a-half from its original running time, but none of its dramatic impact in the playwright’s own screenplay adaptation.
- Frank Swietek @ One Guys Opinion
- Excerpt: Yet another adaptation of a well-regarded stage piece that hasn’t translated particularly well to the screen.
