Slow West crescendos into a bravura shootout between all the involved parties, and it's as gorgeous, nihilistic, and brutally sad as the rest of the film.

| Oct 14, 2015

With its weirdly lyrical portrait of frontier life, this blackly comic oddity balances on the generic knife edge between the western and the musical.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 28, 2015

As the title suggests, Maclean is in no hurry. Even at the most climactic moments, he always looks for an offbeat perspective.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 26, 2015

It's a work of rare purity, directness and concision - a pity that it's lumbered with that slightly deceptive, off-putting title. Slow it's not.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 26, 2015

Slow West is not much like any other western. It's not a great deal like any other film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 26, 2015

The western may be about as relevant to American society as the ability to lasso a rampaging steer, but the genre refuses to die. Instead it evolves, taking on new meanings with each new incarnation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2015

That magical combo: a debut feature that knows exactly where it's going and leaves you wanting more.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2015

It's only slow in the way a rattlesnake or a predatory killer is slow. This terrific film is actually tense, twisty and brilliant.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2015

The film is small in scale but filled with resonant ideas and emotions.

| Jun 25, 2015

Maclean has made a Western of such confident ease that it's hard to believe this is the director's first feature film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2015

Essentially an old-school Western with some interesting tweaks, Slow West -- the debut feature from musician-turned-filmmaker John Maclean -- is a simple story told, yes, slowly. But it offers a bang-up finish.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 11, 2015

There's more to the story than meets the bull's eye in Slow West, a brainy and genre-defying western by newcomer John Maclean.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 11, 2015

Slow West is a clipped, super-economical neo-Western-or rather a meta-Western musing on certain conventions of the genre that refuses to die but continues to mutate, these days usually into more or less ironic forms.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 8, 2015

You don't have to love westerns to like this movie, but those who do might enjoy the way Maclean pays his respects.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2015

It's all of 84 minutes. But when it's done, you know you've seen something.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 28, 2015

Writer-director John Maclean insists at every opportunity that the American west teemed with brutality and that every positive myth about the region was built on a lie, yet he doesn't deliver this familiar revisionist history with much force.

| May 21, 2015

Maclean's film is a wonderfully dreamy, if meandering, take on the western. Like all movies that use their fantastic surroundings, Slow West is best seen on a big screen.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 21, 2015

[A] meandering, deliberate and tearless - yet oddly moving - western vehicle, which is both slow and, as gunslinger movies tend to be, action packed.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 21, 2015

It's always entertaining to see a genre tweaked, at least when it's done so with the proper mix of respect and madness at work in "Slow West."

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 21, 2015

Like most genre manipulations, the film feels one step removed from inspiration - that is, more inspired by other movies than by direct experience. It also lives up to its name.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 21, 2015