The title of the film remains unexplained, but it apparently has nothing to do with the Beatles song or the handful of other films with the same name.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 27, 2021

Neill succeeds with a grace and good humour that do a great deal to calm the histrionics and bring things to a finish lit with a persuasive mingling of sadness and hope.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 24, 2021

Someone nudges this in memoriam in the ribs and reminds it to be a melodrama, at which point a far more typical story of family feuding kicks in.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 19, 2020

It becomes really easy to care about these characters. Sam Neill was a real standout for me as the devoted husband who is trying to keep it together.

| Sep 19, 2020

The moving melodrama is bolstered by an outstanding cast...

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 18, 2020

The film never recovers from a contrived and distracting plot development in the last third that highlights the artificiality of its structure.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 18, 2020

Everything felt too contrived, too scripted, to overly theatrical to resonate on a personal level.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 18, 2020

A glancing treatment of a difficult subject.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 17, 2020

Turns out you can make a silk purse from a sow's ear, if "you" are Susan Sarandon, Sam Neill, Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 17, 2020

A right-to-die drama so inauthentic and maudlin that the terminal illness suffered by its central character is no more than a suction device for the audience's tears.

| Sep 17, 2020

An exceedingly tender and intelligent film about the beauty and grace to be found in death.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 17, 2020

The premise and performers yield some emotional moments, inadvertently heightened by recent events. Yet as a whole, the film never quite takes wing.

| Sep 15, 2020

[A]s superficially sad as the story is willing to get, Blackbird would rather stir up melodrama than produce something genuinely confrontational.

| Original Score: C | Sep 15, 2020

It was oddly formulaic and tame. For a film about assisted dying, it rarely came to life.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 8, 2019

For all the narrowness of its brief, it may be the most beautifully complete film you will see all year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 7, 2019

While not all the notes in this film may work in harmony, it's the love in the story -- between the characters and in the actors' performances -- that holds the movie together.

| Sep 19, 2019

Considering the gravity of the subject matter, what's on view is surprisingly touching and disarming in the best ways.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 17, 2019

The subject matter alone makes it unlikely to bother the latest Marvel movie, but in recent years the TIFF has primarily become an awards season bellwether, and Sarandon shines above the somewhat creaky material.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2019

Michell, screenwriter Christian Torpe...and a talented cast strike a delicate balance in a domestic drama that ably combines heartbreak and humor.

| Original Score: B | Sep 9, 2019

Winslet is miscast, Sarandon is coasting, Neill is sleepwalking and Wasikowska, an extremely talented yet recently underused actor, is stuck playing the sort of role she should have grown out of by now.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 7, 2019