You Were Never Really Here

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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...

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

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

[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.

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...

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

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...

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

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

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...

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.

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

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...

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

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...

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

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

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...

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

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

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

A transcendent, at times almost dangerous film.

We do not deserve Lynne Ramsay.

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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...