Superb acting and tight directing elevate this film about an inmate training a wild mustang.

| Mar 20, 2020

[Their] connection is so wondrous and quietly powerful... This is lovely.

| Sep 23, 2019

Terse and elegiac at best, The Mustang is a dude Western from the Horse Whisperer school.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 4, 2019

As Schoenaerts demonstrated with his pin-eyed rage in Bullhead, he's a physically gifted actor who can convey as much with stillness and silence as he can with pages full of dialogue.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2019

Animals have been coaxing the soft side out of tough guys since Clint Eastwood co-starred with an orangutan, yet there's still something poignant about this meathead engaging with a warmer world.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 31, 2019

While more modest in scale, this might be the most humane addition to the genre since The Shawshank Redemption.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 30, 2019

Despite the fact that the central metaphor is fairly straightforward... I actually thought that the movie told its story very movingly.

| Aug 30, 2019

Manages to be inspirational without going Disney.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 30, 2019

The Mustang could have held more surprises, but as a landscape study - "Prison, with horses" - it's ruggedly stunning.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 29, 2019

The film excels when it considers ideas of forgiveness and resentment - in the grey areas between those dualities is where The Mustang finds the most human of truths.

| Apr 18, 2019

There's a Disney movie in here somewhere, but Clermont-Tonnerre has no interest in it. She's too busy steering her own course, and it works.

| Original Score: B | Mar 29, 2019

Actress turned first-time director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre has a real eye for lyrical images and a gift for casting actors of exceptional skill.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 29, 2019

It is handsomely shot, affectingly acted, and narratively predictable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 27, 2019

A stringent tale of a struggle for redemption.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 27, 2019

Schoenaerts's passion and the horse's grace make their dance-of-life-or-death indelible.

| Mar 21, 2019

Like Roman, though, all I longed for were further glimpses of the life outside, where man and beast roam free, oblivious to any narrative demands.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 21, 2019

This film was developed at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute lab for emerging talent; he certainly found one in French actress Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, here making an impressive feature directorial debut.

| Mar 21, 2019

The Mustang, Clermont-Tonnerre's impressive debut feature, is a slow-burning, tightly coiled character study of felony offender Roman Coleman (Bullhead's Schoenaerts).

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 21, 2019

That sophistication in filmmaking and storytelling wins out in the end. The answers don't come easy, and when they do they're more than a little heartbreaking. "The Mustang" is all the better for it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 20, 2019

Within no more than a minute of screen time, we know that director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre has authority and vision, and that we are watching a good movie.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 20, 2019