Fortune cookie wisdom from the nihilism brigade.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 19, 2023

Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's deftly stylized camerawork reminds us at key intervals that what we're seeing is artifice, dramatization.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 22, 2011

The movie is harrowing and hard to forget. But just when you think there's no hope, Sauvaire throws in a tearful moment of redemption.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 21, 2011

Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.

Full Review | Jan 18, 2011

Basically, talented French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has too much style on his hands. His film isn't as amorally grandiose as City of God. Nor does it achieve the hulking tragedy of Gomorrah.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 4, 2010

What end does a harrowing and horrifying film like this serve? Understanding? Political awareness? I'm not sure. One thing is certain: you won't forget it in a hurry.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 30, 2009

The film sees war as a deadener of moral and physical inhibition, a paradoxical state where there are no winners or losers, just the living and the dead. Stunning.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 23, 2009

There is an odd whiff of post-colonial bongo-bongo about it - i.e. sit back, munch popcorn and watch the natives blow holes in each other.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 23, 2009

War is brutalising, infantilising, dehumanising, requiring the unquestioning submission to authority. All soldiers are child soldiers: that is the bitterly cynical nightmare that Sauvaire's film insists upon to the very end.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 23, 2009

Imagine an African Lord of the Flies pulled off with the jittery expertise of The Hurt Locker, and you're only some of the way to grasping what's in store in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 23, 2009

The film has an immediate power no one could deny.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 23, 2009

The film is swift and gripping but rarely flashy or titillating; sympathetic to its anti-heroes without ever slighting their victims.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 23, 2009

JMD may be technically superb but it is brutal and sick-making. As such, it's hard to fault . . . but I wouldn't watch the blasted thing again if you paid me.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 23, 2009

A fearsome plunge into the world of child soldiers in present-day West Africa.

Full Review | Oct 18, 2008

Grubby and yet vital, it stays with you.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 15, 2008

Johnny Mad Dog is an assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | May 22, 2008