Meadows earns his “Scorsese of the Midlands” tag with eruptions of striking brutality. And the supremely unnerving Considine is his De Niro.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 16, 2023

What's intriguing is that Meadows makes us identify with these small-time hoods, even as he's setting up their executions.

| Oct 13, 2006

Film plays as a quirky Brit riff on everything from U.S. slasher pics to revenge oaters but without Meadows' usual psychological complexity.

| Aug 4, 2006

In a swift 86 minutes, director Meadows and co-writer/star Considine give us a methodical, handsome, emotionally intelligent version of the revenge flick.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 21, 2006

In the end, the picture's more pulp than juice.

| Original Score: C | May 20, 2006

There's a hint of Shakespeare's goriest tragedies here, sucked dry of any attendant heart, emotional depth or compelling human interest.

| Original Score: 1/4 | May 18, 2006

Meadows ... very slowly builds to a powerful climax for this arty cross between Straw Dogs and First Blood.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 12, 2006

Like Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy, it explores the nature of the beast of revenge, leaving the audience in a sweat of dread.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2006

Meadows [makes] a stringy pulp premise into something personal and passionate which builds from relaxed comedy into existential dread...

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | May 12, 2006

Despite some hints at conscience and humanity, Dead Man's Shoes is a typical slasher film at the core.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 11, 2006

Dead Man's Shoes is for the true connoisseur: a tight, well-made, evocative piece of filmmaking that recalls the extreme emotions in some of Sam Peckinpah's genre-benders about retribution and vigilante justice.

Full Review | May 10, 2006

Dead Man's Shoes is all about revenge, but in trying to be one of those serious revenge films that questions violence while indulging in it, it manages to keep virtually all the characters unsympathetic and uninteresting.

Full Review | May 9, 2006

Considine hawks a striking cipher, an avenging angel whose metaphysical communion with otherworldly energies is echoed in the film's unhinged, stewy surface.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 24, 2006

Disturbing, uncompromising and completely gripping.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 1, 2006

The film is filled with deeply unpleasant and stupid people whose vapid speech is largely incomprehensible due to thick regional accents.

Full Review | Oct 6, 2004

A thorny take on the morality of crime and punishment, it's a back-to-basics guerrilla production that sees Meadows heading back to familiar gritty territory.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 6, 2004