What Wildcat has is something so often absent from both film and art these days. It’s not squeamish about the tough conversations nor does it skirt over the most prickly issues.

| Apr 7, 2025

There's enough cogency to its biopic throughlines that makes her story accessible and poignant, but there's a lot about the narrative structure here that poetically blurs the line between fiction and reality.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 13, 2024

Like O’Connor’s writing, it can be both challenging and rewarding depending on a reader or viewer’s tolerance for this particular brand of storytelling.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 24, 2024

While a lot does not work, Ethan Hawke's "Wildcat" is a daring effort to bring the eerie beauty of Flannery o'Connor's work to the screen.

| Original Score: B | Jul 5, 2024

here’s a spark in Maya Hawke’s performance that indicates the inner life as much as the bits of story, both from the page and her time. Wildcat often moves by heedless leaps, but it remains a meditative curiosity. Grace is sought, and sometimes found.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jul 4, 2024

Exceptional performances by Maya Hawke as Flannery O'Connor and Laura Linney as her mother, Regina. The biopic, directed by Ethan Hawke, pays tribute to the writer in an idiosyncratic and unpredictable way that mirrors its unconventional subject.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 11, 2024

Despite its inherent tragedy, the movie has an exuberant, 'let’s put on a show' energy.

| Jun 3, 2024

Wildcat will be a far richer experience for audiences already familiar with O’Connor’s work. For neophytes, there’s still much to enjoy, but the thematic resonance between story and storyteller gets a little lost.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 31, 2024

[O'Connor's] prickly, straight-shooting personality often offended; in Wildcat it's played as a joke, a nuisance.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 24, 2024

If you've read Flannery O'Connor, you'll probably get more out of this story. I have, and I loved the reverence for this lion of literature. Some of the cutting back and forth between the reality and fiction was jarring, but both Hawkes do FO'C proud.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 22, 2024

Largely nonlinear, this fine depiction of a great author avoids typical biopic trappings, instead concentrating on the rhythms of the artistic process and capturing O'Connor's voice in a visual way.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 18, 2024

You can feel that O'Connor tension—the spiritual agony and the courage—all over Maya Hawke’s face.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 17, 2024

With pinpoint production design, makeup and wardrobe capturing the 1950s time period, exquisite cinematography and brilliant work by talented actors who get to sink their teeth into some meaty roles, Wildcat is an inventive and haunting mood piece...

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 17, 2024

Hawke vividly depicts what one deduces from O’Connor’s brash, unrepentantly idiosyncratic work – the blurring of her imagination and reality.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 17, 2024

Ethan Hawke, having made a brilliant biopic about another complicated artist (“Blaze”), this time seems to flinch at an honest and penetrating portrayal of a great writer. Whatever else she was, Flannery O’Connor never flinched.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 17, 2024

The literary tangents disrupt what little flow the film achieves.

| Original Score: C | May 16, 2024

Wildcat never coheres into something compelling or specific. Instead, it drifts like a reader who rereads the same passage a dozen times, and still somehow cannot make any sense of it...

| May 16, 2024

Either approach—a straightforward biography or an anthology movie—might have functioned as an independent project, but their blending ... undercuts both modes.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 16, 2024

Ethan Hawke has weighted the film in favor of O’Connor’s stories, leaving their writer still something of a mystery...but if the Hawkes’ goal was to engage the public with Flannery O’Connor’s writing, they succeeded.

| Original Score: B- | May 15, 2024

It’s a compelling, structurally creative primer on Flannery O’Connor

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 15, 2024