All-time performances by Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello, a stacked supporting cast, and gorgeous cinematography. This is Cronenberg's contemporary masterpiece.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 5, 2024

Cronenberg brilliantly elicits a continuum of emotions, elicits our involvement as well as our reflection. This is an astonishing feat made all the more effective by a complex and subtle performance by Vigo Mortensen...

| May 21, 2024

In much the same manner that David Lynch deconstructed the myth of the squeaky-clean small Southern town in Blue Velvet, so too does David Cronenberg take a hatchet to the facade of bland Midwestern homeliness in A History of Violence.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 26, 2023

A History of Violence is one of the key films of the first decade of the 21st century.

| Jun 7, 2023

There's something really distasteful about a film that claims to be thinking about the real dangers and costs of violence, and then defaults to the usual lazy dodges to make the audience cheer as their stand-in pushes some guy's nose into his brain.

| Jan 27, 2023

With A History of Violence, Cronenberg dares us to examine why we enjoy blood and gore so much.

| Mar 3, 2021

The cast is excellent, especially Harris, steely-eyed and snaky, with William Hurt and Maria Bello...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 13, 2020

A History of Violence was my favorite film of the year...

| Apr 10, 2020

[An] intense, thoughtful, morally ambiguous film.

| Jan 30, 2020

Reveals its hand way too early, and then proceeds to deliver a second hour that left me cold.

| Original Score: C+ | Nov 19, 2019

A fully realized, wholly rendered, singular work of art.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 5, 2019

This story could easily have fallen into Quentin Tarantino pop-violence territory, but Cronenberg, with tremendous skill, manages to use Hollywood cliché to pose questions about the world in which we live.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 26, 2019

That's what Cronenberg is up to here; although the film has an overly facile, glossy edge to it, it's the very polish that makes you question the proceedings.

| Aug 24, 2017

Hopefully [it will] encourage a sobering sense of responsibility and a more truthful perspective on identities (individual and national).

| Original Score: A- | Dec 10, 2015

A fascinating exercise in cinematic restraint resulting in a captivating, not to be missed film.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Oct 4, 2013

The less you know about this movie before seeing it -- and you really should see it -- the better.

| Apr 15, 2013

Cronenberg's direction, mirroring the split in Tom, is alternately measured and frighteningly explosive, and, as always, he gives the movie a nasty underlay of sexual perversity.

Full Review | Apr 15, 2013

This peculiarly predictable picture has been calculated, or miscalculated, to set up certain expectations, fulfill them, and then do the same thing again, thereby giving us a chance to see what's coming and, at least in theory, be shocked.

| Apr 15, 2013

Without conceding any of his iconoclastic vision, Cronenberg has turned a genre film with classic Western overtones into a gripping psychological drama that examines the duality of man and his infatuation with the art of violence.

| Original Score: A- | Apr 20, 2011

While it weakens in its final stretch...A History of Violence succeeds enormously thanks to the strength of its direction and performances.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 16, 2010