Indigenous actor Hamilton Morris is quietly magnificent in his first screen role.

| Jan 5, 2019

Uncompromising, deliberate, and eerily beautiful, director Warwick Thornton's rugged Australian Western puts a new spin on an old story.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 16, 2018

If the movie's outlook is less than hopeful, it nevertheless suggests that there is still time to learn from our mistakes.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 17, 2018

Sweet Country shows that the Western is a genre of ideas that's as suitable to modernization in the northern Australian outback as in the ever-changing North American frontier.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Apr 12, 2018

Australia now has its High Noon.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 10, 2018

Spare, deliberately paced, and almost Biblical in its search for moral justice in a harsh and lawless landscape.

| Original Score: B | Apr 7, 2018

A movie of visuals first and foremost.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 6, 2018

While Sweet Country snakes along to an inevitable outcome, Thornton retains a sharp control over the movie's ravishing visuals, assembling them with a rhythmic quality that transcends any specific time and place.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 5, 2018

A bleak story presented with great style, it's a finely made Australian western that demonstrates the malleability of that most American of genres as well as the impressive gifts of Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton.

| Apr 5, 2018

In a milieu where, the dialogue repeatedly suggests, madness has become the defining condition of the white colonizer, the dispassionate unforgiving beauty of these landscapes-of a country that's often far from sweet-comes to embody its own bleak sanity.

| Apr 5, 2018

Around this spare story...director Warwick Thornton constructs a searing indictment of frontier racism as remarkable for its sonic restraint as its visual expansiveness.

| Apr 5, 2018

[Warwick] Thornton delicately peels back all the layers of Aussie injustice in this film, but what's most unnerving is that the story proves to be so universal.

| Apr 4, 2018

The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 2, 2018

[Warwick] Thornton's direction, cinematography and screenplay could not be more impactful or ochre. The ensemble cast are excellent. And the frontier has seldom looked so forbidding.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 19, 2018

Rangy and lean as a cattle dog, Warwick Thornton's 1920s-set tale of racial tension and rough justice in Australia's Northern Territory is an intriguing mongrel mix of cinematic bloodlines.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 13, 2018

Sweet Country's complexity and sophistication mark it as a landmark work of Indigenous cinema.

| Mar 13, 2018

A painfully real portrait of racism in Australia.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 9, 2018

The shots of scorched red landscapes and dried-up riverbeds are often rapturous and [director Warwick] Thornton's habit of interspersing the action with quick, silent flashbacks and flashforwards adds an air of unsettling fatalism.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 9, 2018

It has a power that makes the cinema shake.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 8, 2018

I can't understand the raves from some critics for Australia's Sweet Country.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 7, 2018