The film's artful gaucheness saves it from prurience and gives the story its ghastly sense of godlessness. Yet beneath the non-interventionist style there is a wealth of symbolic or motivic detail.

| Feb 28, 2023

Henry is extraordinarily perturbing, but it is also a notable cinematographic work. [Full review in Spanish]

| Nov 16, 2022

A relentlessly creepy study in evil.

| Apr 15, 2022

Make no mistake: Henry will give you the creeps.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 18, 2021

[Director John McNaughton] shows few of Henry's dozen or so crimes. Instead he reveals the victims, at the scenes of their deaths, in slow zoom shots accompanied by elegiac music. He is a coroner with a touch of the poet.

| Apr 21, 2020

Combining raw realism and commentary on violent media, McNaughton closes the gap between fictional slasher horror.

| May 7, 2019

A disturbing, realistic film loosely based on Henry Lee Lucas that also questions our relationship to violence in media. One of the best horrors of the 1980s.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 5, 2019

"Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" has a creepy, city-after-dark overtone, an existential chill. It carries a true grindhouse whiff while staking its claim as art.

| Original Score: A | May 17, 2017

It is unspeakably unpleasant, and it is almost perfect.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Dec 5, 2016

The director's artistry overshadows his grind house titillations, though they're still to be found aplenty...not just grim and gross or even disturbing; it's hurtful.

| Nov 9, 2016

It resonates with nightmarish energies, as if possessed by a malevolent quality that keeps its subject matter piercing in this era of violent saturation.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 15, 2015

In a world in which eight nearly identical Friday the 13th movies offer the adventures of Jason the ax-murderer as entertainment for teen-agers, maybe we do need this sobering alternative.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 16, 2014

A powerful, original look at the hopeless urban underclass in the American city, where lost people nibble at the garbage of our culture -- in a kind of perverse application of the "trickle-down" theory -- hating themselves and us all the while.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 16, 2014

If you want a gore fix, this is it. If you're looking for a film with purpose, better wait until the bill changes.

| Sep 16, 2014

McNaughton's rough, non-judgemental direction gives the film a stylishly chilling documentary feel, while the killer's use of a camcorder asks some challengingly uncomfortable questions about voyeurism and the nature of screen violence.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 16, 2014

John McNaughton's direction has flashes of cinematic brilliance, but there's a disturbing lack of purpose to its clinically told and horrifyingly violent tale.

| Sep 16, 2014

A drama of vivid intensity, it has all the marks of a well-made, thoughtful film that does not exploit violence for its own sake or make killing a source of entertainment.

| Aug 12, 2013

The film is an honest and disturbing attempt to come to grips with the sort of modern horror that we must -- more urgently every day -- try to understand.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 12, 2013

This movie is not really about a killer, but about killing -- the way killing is depicted in the movies and the way movie audiences have been conditioned to react to such violence.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 12, 2013

The difference between John McNaughton's incredibly chilling film and the usual serving of screen carnage is the difference between the mind of a murderer and the cynical and manipulative depiction of mindless murder.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 12, 2013