You Were Never Really Here

From the disorienting opening to the enigmatic finale, Lynne Ramsay is always really here, her commanding vision shining through every frame.

Phoenix gives an astounding performance, bolstered by an unpredictable script and soundtrack.

A film of external beauty in Ramsay’s visual language and sound design but it’s anchored by the internal work of her leading man.

A taut and almost unbearably intense 90-minutes, without an ounce of fat on it. Ramsay doesn’t give you a second to breathe.

[Director Ramsay’s] return seals her standing as one of our most fearless and forceful filmmakers, if not one as prolific as she deserves to be.

You Were Never Really Here may be something of a blunt instrument. But it still managed to knock me out.

It’s the kind of movie I’m glad [Ramsay] made because her interrogation of Joe’s masculinity is the sort of thing endemic to the...

Enough information is provided to let us discern the rudiments of a conventional plot – but our understanding of this remains tentative...

The film is a bad trip so trippy you could start to enjoy its fortissimo miserabilism.

Through it all walks Phoenix as Joe, and rarely has this mercurial actor seemed so simultaneously threatening and vulnerable, unstoppable and lost.

You Were Never Really Here is a demanding film, but it’s not a reckless one. To watch it is to see a rigorous and intensely creativ...

You don’t watch You Were Never Really Here. You fall into it, one shot and sound at a time.

Ramsay’s screenplay is based on a novella by Jonathan Ames, which scans as the leanest of prose. Ramsay turns it into violent, visual po...

You Were Never Really Here is a masterpiece of monstrous beauty and grief-stricken rage that burrows under your skin and into your head, and r...

Joaquin Phoenix is simply stupendous in a revenge thriller from the brilliant Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay that gets under your skin and ma...

[Lynne] Ramsay shoots [john’s] operations with the same lean, clinical skill with which he executes them: a master class in melding of perfor...

Audiences, particularly heterosexual male audiences, still eat up the old rugged-individualist noir cliches. It’s about time a female directo...

Joaquin Phoenix has never been shy about going big if the role called for it – and maybe even if the role didn’t necessarily call for it...

It’s a mesmerizing illustration of [Ramsay’s] ability to treasure small gestures and whispered exchanges over exposition to construct&n...

The ghost of Travis Bickle haunts this nightmarish and humidly absorbing psychological drama from Lynne Ramsay.

There are multitudes in here, but not a second is wasted. It is a brash, noisy, violent picture, but it is also a subtle, intricate, thou...

A stunningly lean and intense avenger noir, its thriller storyline studded with cryptic flashbacks and off-kilter violence.

You Were Never Really Here amounts to more than a Taxi Driver for our time. Despite the obvious homage, this is a Ramsay film, rooted in...

Lynne Ramsay has made a film that burns so much brighter and cuts so much deeper than any such story has a right to. Do you remember the first...

You Were Never Really Here presents as Ramsay’s first genre offering, ramping up the body count and bloodshed, while maintaining her usual fo...

You don’t watch a Ramsay film – you’re consumed by it. You Were Never Really Here is the greatest testament to that.

You Were Never Really Here isn’t just about the rescue of a State Senator’s daughter. Rather an expression of a single man’s...

For all of its meticulous construction and often masterful craft, the film remains something to coldly admire rather than easily embrace, often pla...

Ramsay has made more sensually rapturous films, but this may be her most formally exacting: No shot or cut here is idle or extraneous.

In these staggeringly taut 85 minutes, Ramsay sees a hopeless universe in a jelly bean.

Extraordinarily, Ramsay’s film is not about people; instead it uses them and their bodies to explore American systems of power, and the abuse...

If you’re still with the movie after the first ten minutes you’re probably with it for the long haul (and possibly for life – it l...

You Were Never Really Here is a powerful assault of a film, but it’s missing its director’s inimitable poetry.

You Were Never Really Here is a bold piece of storytelling, with a dream-like feel that evokes its hellish, predominantly nocturnal world...

We do not deserve Lynne Ramsay.

Ramsay is now four for four, one of our most exciting filmmakers. If she could not leave it so long next time, that’s just fine with us.

In the end, there’s no question that what you’re watching is a masterfully-made movie, albeit one that’s easier to admire fr...

Ramsay has made a terrific short story, economical as hell but also so moment-for-moment gripping that you want to pore over its every shot, i...

This is a stunning, gut-punch of a film though, technically adept and masterfully acted it thumps others of the genre into mush, showing...

With a jarring 11th-hour twist, [director Lynne] Ramsay leaves you pondering what menace lies beneath all those familiar sights and sounds.

[director Lynne] Ramsay creates many memorable images and evokes a disorienting atmosphere.

I’d happily pay to see this movie again. And again. Phoenix and Ramsay are demonic upstarts. And for most of this movie it’s just heave...

What it lacks in straightforward narrative structure, it makes up for in chest-level punch, and "You Were Never Really Here" lands like a blow...

A transcendent, at times almost dangerous film.