This is not simply a distinctive western; it is a masterful one.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 31, 2021

Five Fingers For Marseilles is an impressively put together western that manages to balance entertainment with palpable political discourse.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 19, 2019

A craggy, gutbucket epic full of slightly silly, mythopoetic grandeur and a tart taste of regional politics. It's amazing how well some tropes travel.

| Dec 7, 2018

Five Fingers for Marseilles is an achievement in cinema ... an emotionally relentless film which feels like it's been handled by masters of the craft.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 31, 2018

While the time is modern, some years after the end of apartheid, "Five Fingers" could easily be a part of the Leone Western canon.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 1, 2018

Superb acting by all the leads and supporting players populate the desolate landscape with human dramas large and small in a place where people scrape a living out of harsh conditions.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Sep 25, 2018

[Director Michael] Matthews clearly has a lot of love for the elements inspiring Five Fingers for Marseilles, but it ultimately falls apart during the exact moments it should be most compelling.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 19, 2018

A beautifully bleak tale of the morass left by apartheid, but also by the weaker aspects of human nature.

| Sep 17, 2018

its dedication to its vision of using the genre tropes of the morally ambiguous spaghetti western to explore the fraught racial and economic politics of post-Apartheid South Africa is impressive

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 17, 2018

[Five Fingers for Marseilles] is ripe with indignation, injustice, righteous violence and, ultimately, a shootout of cosmic resonance.

| Sep 14, 2018

A brutal but thoughtful film invoking subtle social allegory, "Marseilles" demonstrates both the durability and elasticity of the genre.

| Sep 13, 2018

The film's vistas are beautiful and Matthews's aim, high, but those aspirations are not fully realized in what feels like a first draft attempt at brushing Western customs with textures drawn from a South African palette.

| Original Score: 6.1/10 | Sep 10, 2018

Though its opening act may hint at some missed thematic potential, fans of the Western genre will surely find much to appreciate in Five Fingers for Marseilles.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 10, 2018

A failed attempt to use South Africa as a place to recycle Sergio Leone when social reality cries out for a new Ousmane Sembene instead.

| Sep 8, 2018

There are no thrills in this western yarn, just a mounting series of tragedies that are by turns frustrating and numbing.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 7, 2018

There's no glory to gunshots in Five Fingers for Marseilles... yet, the film itself is triumphant, rife with rattling performances.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Sep 6, 2018

This gritty South Africa-set western takes a turn towards campy drama.

| Sep 6, 2018

In stylish and entertaining fashion, "Five Fingers for Marseilles" looks over the South African countryside and finds fresh vistas for the western genre.

| Sep 6, 2018

While there are gunfights and everything concludes with a big shoot-out, the complexity of the situation and the murkiness of Tau's quest for redemption are anything but standard-order fare for a Western.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 5, 2018

What happens in this neo-western isn't dictated by the tried and true themes the classic westerns but by the films themselves.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 4, 2018