It's a curious film that defies categorisation, opening quietly before descending into a cacophony of cathartic bloodletting by the chaotic finale.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 10, 2021

I don't want to spoil a second of Bacurau, but it's one of the best filmic distillations of that impending 21st-century sense of doom, a concentrated vision of the apocalypse that somehow manages to strike a hopeful note.

| Jan 27, 2021

Mendonça and Dornelles's film is... an attempt to grapple with unspeakable, horrifying evil -- but an evil that must be understood in social and historical rather than biblical terms.

| May 2, 2020

It's a rallying cry against structural injustice told through a satisfying blend of western and science fiction influences.

| Apr 17, 2020

It resonates. And despite the beauty of the weathered local faces this movie celebrates, it resonates for anyone, anywhere, watching it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 5, 2020

This movie gets a lot of points for being strange and Sônia Braga is all out as an alcoholic doctor.

| Apr 4, 2020

You never know where this movie is going. It is dreamlike for a long time and then it just becomes stunningly, graphically violent. You're laughing at moments that maybe you shouldn't be. It's really vivid, really odd, and unlike anything else.

| Apr 4, 2020

For a fascinating hour or so, "Bacurau" ushers us into this strange, forbidding yet vibrant part of a world gone to hell.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 26, 2020

[T]he endeavour quickly degenerates into a gory and increasingly alienating splatter-filled shoot'em-up.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 16, 2020

Prepare to be amazed.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 16, 2020

Clever genre flourishes... playfully deliver the film's anticolonial politics.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 15, 2020

Mendonça and Dornelles upend the movie cliché of urban heroes fleeing rural maniacs, but Bacurau has a depth of flavour not always easy to find...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 11, 2020

While the story is genuinely surprising and unique once it gets where it's going, the diversions along the way make Bacurau more intellectually exciting than viscerally tense, even in that gory back half.

| Original Score: B | Mar 10, 2020

A film that is deeply embedded within, and knowledgable of, Brazil's treacherous modern history.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 10, 2020

Those shortcomings are generally of little consequence, so enchanting is Bacurau's mix of the wild and the wacko. Don't worry about understanding its every pointed twist, it's a blast of beguiling mayhem.

| Mar 9, 2020

An ingenious mashup of American westerns and the satirical and political work that swept Brazilian cinema in the 1960s.

| Mar 9, 2020

Bacurau never wastes a chance to leave a mark on its audience.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 6, 2020

Part of what's exciting is how the filmmakers marshal genre in the service of their ideas, using film form to deflect, tease and surprise.

| Mar 5, 2020

It crams elements of the western, John Carpenter-y beats, mordant wit and peppery political commentary into one hugely entertaining modern exploitation flick.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 24, 2020

The light touches of science fiction evoke present-day depravities, and the vision of local unity offers a thrillingly imaginative playbook for resistance.

| Sep 23, 2019