
Variety
J.M. Coetzee's brilliant 1980 novel of colonial breakdown is a tough prospect to film; he and Colombian auteur Ciro Guerra make an uneven but eventually stirring stab at it.
Full reviewOscar winner Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies) stars alongside Robert Pattinson and Johnny Depp for this historical drama centred on a distant outpost, where one Magistrate begins to question his loyalty to the Empire. From the director of Embrace of the Serpent and Birds of Passage.
J.M. Coetzee's brilliant 1980 novel of colonial breakdown is a tough prospect to film; he and Colombian auteur Ciro Guerra make an uneven but eventually stirring stab at it.
Full reviewIt feels vital, bolstered and humanised by a stunning portrait of quiet humanity by Mark Rylance.
Full reviewCiro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel's apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.
Full reviewIts principal performances are superb, and yet most of the movie is dead on screen.
Full reviewDepp... seems under the impression that he's still working with Tim Burton.
Full reviewSparks fly... but not enough for award-winning Colombian director Ciro Guerra to save this anti-imperialist allegory from the thuddingly obvious.
Full reviewIntermittently engrossing and always interesting, but less potent than it could have been.
Full reviewIt's a collision of talents, technique and even philosophy: The much-honoured Mr. Rylance can be an antidote to actorly artifice; Mr. Depp is a delivery system for eccentricity.
Full reviewDespite the sincerity that's in every scene with Rylance's performance, the movie's good intentions remain wistful, and thoroughly frustrating.
Full reviewThis is proficient, measured filmmaking from a director who has already peered more deeply, and persuasively, into colonialism's heart of darkness.
Full reviewThe heavy-handed allegory... relies too much on abuse and would-be Big Ideas.
Full reviewAn emotionally brutal and slow-paced film that has a few good performances and not a lot to say.
Full reviewThe screenplay is written by J.M. Coetzee, adapting his own 1980 novel with a strikingly free hand but the message left intact - the eternal awful irony of which Them should really fear which Us.
Full reviewThe book, with its themes of paranoia and totalitarianism, was acclaimed as a masterpiece. But the film... doesn't quite work.
Full reviewThe film... wants to tear down the Empire-loving writer's romanticised notions of non-Western cultures, but does not quite know how.
Full reviewThere's not much here for even the most ardent fan of overdetermined political fables.
Full reviewIt’s all perfectly well-done, and it all recedes into memory the instant you leave the theater.
Full reviewLike its noncommittal production design, which combines various North African, Middle Eastern and Asian influences for the locals and locales, the critique itself remains finally quite dull and dispersed because it's so broad and unspecific.
Full reviewIt’s easy to read the film as a not particularly subtle metaphor for fascism or “the war on terror”, and its black hats aren’t so much characters as automatons.
Full reviewWaiting for the Barbarians is available to stream in New Zealand now on Google Play and Apple TV.
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