Lawless wants to be something larger than life, but it's too joyless to be a tall tale and too self-satisfied for tragedy.

| Feb 22, 2019

Hillcoat makes a foray into Virginia's Prohibition-era moonshine country. But the adaptation (by Hillcoat compadre Nick Cave) is a hokey piece of pop history that wearyingly insists upon its own mythos like a comic-book blockbuster.

| Jul 1, 2013

It's slight and casual to the point of laziness, but it's straight fun, done with knowledge and a laconic pleasure. You could do far worse.

| Jun 14, 2013

Lawless is a compellingly nutty and uneven gangster film.

| Nov 28, 2012

Certainly has its moments, yet lacks the tension of a real classic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 7, 2012

Whereas, for the most part, the film comes across as a competent muddle, it actually becomes full on disastrous when Pearce is on screen.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2012

[It] is thoroughly corrupt in its lip-smacking love of violence and has a script, written by Nick Cave, so transparent it verges on the comic.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 6, 2012

You may be laughing out loud at the very moment you're also feeling appalled.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2012

The center of narrative gravity is hard to locate; for whom are we rooting, and does anything really ripple outward from this nasty local fight?

| Sep 3, 2012

An uneven mix of impressively executed, violent clichs about good ol' boys defending the American right to flout the law.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 3, 2012

Fans of The Proposition will have to settle for sublimely evil performances by Gary Oldman (as a murderous rival) and Guy Pearce (as a government agent) and a large quotient of gut-wrenching violence.

| Aug 31, 2012

Pearce, in gloves and slicked-down hair parted in the middle, is one of the best villains of the year.

| Original Score: B | Aug 30, 2012

Although it slides down easily, there's very little kick to this moonshining picture.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 30, 2012

With a dynamite cast, an iconic screenwriter in rocker Nick Cave and an Aussie director in John Hillcoat, you assume a new classic. What you get is an ambitious try.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 30, 2012

You can sense the filth, and smell the rust, and feel the ingrained poverty that might well convince a family of survivors (of World War I and the Spanish flu) to make their fortune selling moonshine to their neighbors.

| Aug 30, 2012

There's something at the movie's heart that remains flimsy and inauthentic, a kid in his older brother's ill-fitting shoes.

| Aug 30, 2012

Much of the action may be nearly as grim as in director John Hillcoat's previous feature, "The Road" - "Lawless" is very bloody - but the scenery and production design are a whole lot nicer.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 30, 2012

This isn't to say that there's not enough here, but just don't look for it all to add up.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 30, 2012

Lawless is filled with forbidding shadows and verdant abundance, contrasting the indifference of nature with the violence of the humanity within it.

| Original Score: B | Aug 30, 2012

I can only admire this film's craftsmanship and acting, and regret its failure to rise above them.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 29, 2012