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

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

I think [Flannery O'Connor] was a great writer, but unapproachable in some ways. I'd say that for the movie as well.

| May 13, 2024

Brims with passion and integrity. I’m grateful that it exists.

Full Review | May 10, 2024

In the hands of such passionate talents, “Wildcat” becomes a curious and purposeful project that goes beyond the guidelines of traditional 'biopics' to try to give life to O'Connor's most intimate thoughts. [Full review in Spanish]

| May 7, 2024

“Wildcat” shows that his [Hawke] gifts in front of the camera are being complemented behind it, too, especially when the subject is a life woven through with art, passion and pain.

| May 6, 2024

Despite a strong cast, this Flannery O’Connor biopic doesn’t capture the prose of its subject.

| May 3, 2024

The literary love fest, though well-intentioned, ends up being more mild than wild. For a true taste of O’Connor’s magic, see Wise Blood (1979), in which her work was best realized onscreen.

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

[Its] flights of fancy are wildly over-the-top, with gifted actors offering their versatility in the service of obnoxious, eccentric caricatures.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 3, 2024

Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.

| May 2, 2024

By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 28, 2024

A dreamy movie that evokes O’Connor’s biggest project: an inquiry into the broken nature of grace.

| Sep 30, 2023

The fall festivals are a time for the most by-the-numbers biopics to launch their Oscar hopes. Amid that sameness, this collaboration between Ethan Hawke and daughter Maya Hawke is a much needed burst of inspiration.

| Sep 18, 2023

Despite Maya Hawke throwing herself headfirst into the part, her father’s attempts to capture O’Connor’s mind, body, and soul end up feeling incomplete.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 15, 2023

Ultimately, the screenplay, written by Ethan Hawke and Shelby Gaines, is smart enough to lean into the contradictions of the woman and her work, but not to attempt to offer a definitive statement one way or another.

| Sep 14, 2023

Hawke has profiled artists before in directorial efforts ... but this feels like his most ambitious drama, a movie that doesn’t just hit events in the life of its subject but digs deep into what influenced their work.

| Sep 14, 2023

Ethan has clearly given thought to what makes O’Connor a distinct personality, and strikes the right contrast between her jaded disaffection and her prevailing beliefs, but always by artlessly speaking them in plain declarations.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 13, 2023

Wildcat understands that the two-way process between artist and art is beyond classification, and has no beginning or end.

| Sep 11, 2023

The film plods but Ms. Hawke shines.

| Sep 7, 2023