The Butcher Boy is bold and often shocking, but the film’s playful humor crashes against the dark, manic, sometimes depressing material and makes for an oddly enjoyable-if-devastating drama.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 8, 2024

The Butcher Boy is a trip, all right, but one that I'm sorry I took.

| Feb 5, 2018

The movie is well-crafted and tightly assembled, but it's also loud and unmodulated.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 9, 2018

...clumsily lurches from one irrelevant, uninteresting episode to the next...

| Original Score: 0/4 | Jan 26, 2014

Owens' remarkable, high-pitched performance and Jordan's lush, visionary style are perfectly suited to the material.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 11, 2008

Intensely colourful, but somehow soulless.

| Mar 11, 2008

Director Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe adapted McCabe's novel for this bland 1998 shocker that fails miserably as satire, character study, and anything else it might have aspired to.

| Mar 11, 2008

A horrific tale of madness and abuse told with pop-eyed color and giddy humor.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 28, 2007

Though the movie sometimes looks as if the authentic Irish wit, colour and blarney has been filtered through the sensibility of a Buuel or Polanski, Jordan never allows the surreal/expressionist aspects to dominate.

| Jun 24, 2006

The film almost immediately loses the major asset of the novel: its language. Possibly a quarter of the movie is incomprehensible to the American ear.

Full Review | Jan 19, 2006

Jordan's 10th feature is an ambitious pic that remains intimately focused, a brutally honest exploration of a disturbed mind that is both horrific and darkly comic.

| Dec 24, 2005

The film's horrific conclusion is as uncompromising as it is inevitable and, unfortunately, ever-more topical.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 6, 2005

The Butcher Boy manages to present scenes of violence and despair within a carnival atmosphere, yet still touches us, largely due to Jordan's assured hand in directing this complex tale.

| Apr 9, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 6, 2005

The Butcher Boy reveals how a soul's future, in the early stages of development, is highly influenced by love, or the lack of it.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jan 15, 2005

I find myself in an embarrassing position: I think this is a great movie, but I'm not sure.

Full Review | Aug 7, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 28, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 23, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 17, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 9, 2003