If wrath doesn’t best some up The Nightingale then no other word can do it justice. Jennifer Kent has made another terrific film which only further demonstrates how exciting a voice she will be going forward into the new decade.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2024

"'The Nightingale' is a rich and vivid work from a director whose bold vision accounts for its brutality."

| Sep 20, 2023

Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale will not attract the same cult following or breadth of widespread fan devotion as The Babadook, but her latest marks significant progress in the filmmaker’s command of story and cinematic language.

| Jun 7, 2023

To watch the film is to accept a merciless confrontation with colonial violence. It's also a step toward healing.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 26, 2022

The Nightingale proves to be a powerful study of survival, rather than the trauma itself.

| Aug 10, 2021

The most shocking film of the year.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 18, 2021

[The Nightingale]holds a darkly sober mirror that reflects the horrors of colonialism, racism, and misogyny.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 29, 2021

"An unflinchingly violent film that is not able to tackle its politics about gender, race and violence in a nuanced way. Brutal from beginning to end but never left satisfyingly avenged."

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 27, 2020

The film cinematically captures the harsh elements of Tasmania and Clare's every emotion while the script splays open the traumas of these injustices from which only the most resilient can recover.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Nov 21, 2020

[Baykali Ganambarr's] performance... will tear you apart.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 27, 2020

The film even nearly falters because of its great emphasis on gratuitous violence. However, there are still some high points to be found.

| Oct 2, 2020

A very beautiful and compellingly told tale of a dark history, delivered with a sense of fury and anger that more than makes it searing and distinctive. Yet, in its rage, it threatens to lose sight of its audience.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 28, 2020

Filmmaker Jennifer Kent delivers a gritty, unflinching portrait of the Australian outback that's certainly quite compelling throughout...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 4, 2020

With a precise execution, Kent conceives a gripping and moving suspense film that, as a tale of revenge, addresses topics on violence against women and the corollaries of racism fabricated by the most implacable colonialism. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 27, 2020

The Nightingale strips back all varieties of artifice and fantasy, striving to represent a notoriously brutal period in Australia's colonial past as realistically as possible.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 13, 2020

It is an extremely difficult film to watch. It's quite a smart film [...] and Jennifer Kent's direction is very accomplished. But I do think it's a legitimate question to ask whether [the brutality] is pushed a little too far.

| May 22, 2020

The Nightingale is disturbingly upfront about what it wants to show you, but frustratingly elusive about what it might be wanting to say.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 3, 2020

Kent's deglamorized, relentlessly unpleasant depiction of suffering couldn't be further from the adolescent glee of Tarantino's films. Still, there's something vaguely two-faced about Kent's revenge narrative.

| Mar 10, 2020

Its unrelenting (and repetitive) brutality is tough to stomach and, for some, will stumble over into exploitation territory (at heart, this is a revenge thriller from the 1970s).

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 15, 2020

It's unapologetic in the way Kent confronts the troubled past of her own country, although the equating of the abuse of white women to the near-massacre of entire race of people has continued to trouble this writer some days after viewing.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 6, 2020