A cryptically stunning crime drama casting Joaquin Phoenix as a contract killer whose comingled violence and conscience-stricken pain are complicated by PTSD as a Gulf War veteran...

| Aug 23, 2024

There’s something about Phoenix taps into Joe’s ability to both transcend his PTSD (ie. save young women from dangerous situations) and suffer heavily from it. It makes those final moments at the diner so beautiful...

| Aug 7, 2024

You Were Never Really Here is not for the faint of heart–it is cold and violent but there are extremely important messages throughout.

| Original Score: B | Jul 8, 2024

It was my second viewing that I was able to fall in with the film’s unique rhythms.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 20, 2022

Ramsay made You Were Never Really Here somehow both economical and impressionistic, uncanny and sympathetic, savage and heartening.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 14, 2022

This film is cinema stripped back beyond the bone.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Mar 12, 2022

To say that Lynne Ramsay has a powerful understanding of film may be an obvious statement.

| Jan 11, 2022

Extremely violent and incredibly stylish, [this] is another zig-zag for both a writer-director and star who have never adhered to the rules.

| Original Score: A- | Aug 21, 2021

A few individual moments crackle, but it's ultimately disappointing to see an artist as unique as Ramsay wrestling with something so familiar.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 16, 2021

Frozen by disturbing memories, the blunt object that is Lynne Ramsay's award-winning potboiler is far more hulking than a quick death by bullet.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 12, 2021

The flashbacks are jagged, poking into the story like a shard of glass slashing through silk. Those elements, bolstered by an tense score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, combine to present an intriguing, elliptical portrait of a tortured soul.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2021

This is a terrible, marketably violent film that sheds no light whatsoever on its ostensible subject matter or characters.

| Feb 21, 2021

Phoenix is great as the embodiment of emasculated, bruised male ego and does his hammer do the talking. The diner scene at the end is every bit as memorable as the ones in Good Fellas or Five Easy Pieces from a complete opposite spectrum.

| Feb 13, 2021

Ramsay melds physical and psychological pain with such acuity that her bloody righteous-rescue movie sometimes appears to be deconstructing itself, piece by piece, before our eyes.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 5, 2021

One of its main points of singularity is its focus on the aftermath of mayhem rather than the bloodletting as it's being exacted.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Dec 7, 2020

You Were Never Really Here is about lost souls being found in unconventional ways.

| Nov 10, 2020

It's hard to describe what Phoenix does here, but what he does here is nothing short of masterful.

| Original Score: 4.0/4.0 | Sep 27, 2020

What seems to be an ode to crime/noir, prefers to take a different more personal path into the intimacy of its main character, whom never makes catharsis. Visually stunning. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 30, 2020

A psycho-drama that evokes the splendour of Martin Scorsese' Taxi Driver with a broodingly paced plot, relying heavily on suggestion than any real brutality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 19, 2020

It's a film that's incredibly tactful in its brutality and what it chooses to show, often detaching its protagonist from his actions.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 24, 2020