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

[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

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

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

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

Sure, it's compelling; the nature of the material guarantees that. But it doesn't seem to be telling us much more than that the world is a scary place and murder is ugly. We knew those things. This is tabloid chic.

| Aug 12, 2013

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is as fine a film as it is a brutally disturbing one.

| Aug 12, 2013

McNaughton's direction combines a strict social realism with a cool, Fritz Langian sense of pre-determination, while his work with actors has the improvisational freshness of a John Cassavetes.

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

This is sicko territory with a vengeance but certainly has an impact.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 20, 2008

Certainly not for everyone, but if slasher movies are your cup of tea this is a lot better than most, and the use of Chicago locations is especially effective.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 20, 2008

[T]his is a movie that will anger and frighten audiences... Many will also find this one of the most impressive film debuts of the '80s.

Full Review | Apr 16, 2007

McNaughton's compelling study of a blithe sociopath makes the flesh crawl and the mind reel.

| Jun 24, 2006

The film doesn't so much bring us closer to the serial murderer as it reminds us of our culpability as spectators.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 7, 2005

There are still some shocks.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 8, 2003

Mr. McNaughton's observations are so chilling and precise that they gain some artistic stature even when they cross the line that makes the audience voyeurs and accomplices.

Full Review | May 20, 2003

John McNaughton's haunting film is a grim journey into the life of its twisted subject that refuses to moralise or judge.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 21, 2003

This film gives off a dark chill that follows you all the way home.

| May 12, 2001

The emptiness in Henry seems like an artistic convenience or, worse, an evasion. What we suspect, finally, is that the deficiencies belong more to the artist than to his subject.

| Jan 1, 2000

A low-budget tour de force that provides an unforgettable portrait of the pathology of a man for whom killing is not a crime but simply a way of passing time and relieving boredom.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

The fact that Henry is affectless on the surface but commits exploitation-movie mayhem on the side is, by now, less an unsettling revelation than a rote banality.

| Original Score: B | Sep 24, 1986