John Woo’s first American film in 20 years is not the filmmaker at his peak — but it has its moments, with energetically filmed action enough to distract from a melodramatic tone and sometimes silly concept.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 5, 2024

The film is scuppered by its own gimmick.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 24, 2023

This comeback movie has a lot of what Woo is famous for, such as operatic gunfights, but it also has something new: there is almost no dialogue over the 104-minute run-time.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 16, 2023

The new movie feels too simple for him [Woo], a thriller with only vengeance on its brain.

| Dec 14, 2023

One of the most deliriously cinematic movies of the year.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 6, 2023

Chatter’s hardly needed when director John Woo is crafting his trademark stylish, over-the-top violence.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 2, 2023

Silent Night isn’t good enough for us to erupt into the applause Woo has so often deserved, but it’s also not bad enough for us to mourn the film-maker that he once was...

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 1, 2023

The dialogue-free action movie “Silent Night” is a fascinating experiment — but a failed one. As it turns out, modern action movies, though they can be ideal vessels for bombastic image-making, need words to convey humor and humanity.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Dec 1, 2023

Marco Beltrami’s pounding score gives the proceedings a silent-movie feel while Woo relies on the faces of his actors to tell the story, a fatal flaw as Kinnaman cannot portray anything but dourness.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Dec 1, 2023

The movie may sound ingenious -- Buster Keaton with bloodshed instead of slapstick -- but the gimmick goes stale quickly.

| Dec 1, 2023

But even if Silent Night is lesser Woo, it’s still nice to have the Hong Kong titan flexing his action muscles in Hollywood again, and all I want for Christmas is an announcement that he’ll have another present for us to unwrap in the very near future.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 1, 2023

Silent Night takes itself deadly seriously, and is all the more brutal to sit through as a result. The holidays are already exhausting enough without having this as added punishment.

| Original Score: D | Nov 30, 2023

Woo has been doing this for decades now, and he knows how to deliver wild ballets of bullets and blood better than 99 percent of the people who have ever done it.

| Original Score: B | Nov 30, 2023

Again and again it’s the image of Kinnaman’s terribly agonized face that rivets the viewer.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 30, 2023

This tale of bloody vengeance is not the most satisfying delivery device for Woo’s unique brand of melodramatic, slow-mo carnage.

| Nov 30, 2023

There’s a lot of sound and fury and it works: This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.

| Nov 30, 2023

Silent Night puts you in a chokehold from the start and never relaxes its grip

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 30, 2023

If you have ever watched a bone-crunching action film and thought, you know, this thing is so stupid you could watch it without dialogue, John Woo has made the movie for you.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 29, 2023

There’s nothing here to match the ingenious audacity of, say, the hospital-shootout-with-infant sequence in 1982’s “Hard Boiled,” but once “Silent Night” finally unwraps its gratuitous gifts, the faithful Woo fans should find them worth the wait.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 28, 2023

Silent Night takes its preposterous premise deadly seriously. And not even the carnage Woo offers can combat the tedium of this film's cliches.

| Nov 28, 2023