Detroit
Annapurna Pictures | Release Date: July 28, 2017 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
77
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 49 Critic Reviews
Positive:
42
Mixed:
5
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayJul 28, 2017
Detroit is an audacious, nervy work of art, but it also commemorates history, memorializes the dead and invites reflection on the part of the living. In scale, scope and the space it offers for a long-awaited moral reckoning, it’s nothing less than monumental. Read full review
100
New York PostSara StewartJul 27, 2017
Detroit may be tricked out with the Motown and miniskirts of the era, but its police-brutality narrative, assembled with firsthand accounts of that day, has chilling parallels with the here and now. It is not an easy watch, and it is an essential one. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJul 27, 2017
Dramatically relentless and emotionally shattering, it brings news from a turbulent past that casts a baleful light on America’s troubled present. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJul 26, 2017
Detroit is a movie that will make you angry. It is designed to make you angry, and it does nothing to soften the blow or create some artificial uplift. But there is something about honesty that’s exhilarating. Detroit is tough, but it’s worth it, every minute of it. Read full review
100
Time OutJoshua RothkopfJul 25, 2017
To watch Bigelow’s expertly calibrated chaos during the riots’ escalation – nothing short of block-by-block guerilla warfare – is to witness something depressingly familiar to anyone who has seen the videos of today’s police brutality, of violently botched arrests and furious community responses, and worried that it would never get better. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJul 25, 2017
Arriving in theaters almost exactly 50 years since the Detroit riots of late July 1967, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit is a searing, pulse-pounding, shocking and deeply effective dramatic interpretation of events in and around the Algiers Motel. Read full review
100
VarietyOwen GleibermanJul 23, 2017
Bigelow, working from a script by her regular collaborator Mark Boal (it’s their first film since “Zero Dark Thirty”), has created a turbulent, live-wire panorama of race in America that feels like it’s all unfolding in the moment, and that’s its power. We’re not watching tidy, well-meaning lessons — we’re watching people driven, by an impossible situation, to act out who they really are. Read full review
98
TheWrapClaudia PuigJul 23, 2017
Detroit has a vital sense of authenticity, rooted as it is in history, conveyed via Bigelow’s meticulously crafted cinema vérité style that, essentially, thrusts the viewer into the tense events. She is an expert at managing suspense and deftly blending sensitivity with a journalistic sense of details. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattJul 25, 2017
A sincere effort to illuminate a singularly dark chapter in history — and a stark reminder of exactly what gets lost when human beings fail to take care of their own. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzAug 3, 2017
Detroit, as a movie, is all over the place, yet oddly that messiness is one of its strengths. It is also appropriate. Necessary, even. It fits. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJul 27, 2017
What makes Detroit vital is not that its images are new or revelatory, but rather that Bigelow and Boal have succeeded, with enviable coherence and tremendous urgency, in clarifying those images into art. Read full review
90
New York Daily NewsJordan HoffmanJul 24, 2017
This movie will spark debate, even with an end title card that reminds audiences of the concept of dramatic license. But as a movie, and not a court document, it is extraordinary. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonAug 3, 2017
The film is hard to watch, but its timeliness is impossible to ignore. Still, a case could be made that Bigelow dwells on the violence a bit too obsessively. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreAug 3, 2017
If Bigelow cannot quite bring herself to gracefully end her difficult, challenging movie — which changed studios and finds itself parked in theaters on the tail end of popcorn picture season — it’s because it’s too important a subject to risk shortchanging, too pointed a message to risk letting audiences miss. Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldAug 2, 2017
Bigelow has a way of making scripted drama feel like an utterly gripping newsreel. That’s not necessarily all to the good — I found myself wishing for more character development — but you can’t deny the power of the filmmaking. Read full review
88
USA TodayAndrea MandellJul 27, 2017
The film's unflinching gaze on a lawless night will likely be politicized, but calling Detroit anti-police misses the mark. The question Detroit begs is, in a democratic nation, to whom does the law apply? Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversJul 25, 2017
It's a hardcore masterpiece that digs into our violent past to hold up a dark mirror to the systemic racism that still rages in the here and now. Read full review
83
ConsequenceDominick Suzanne-MayerJul 28, 2017
As the film’s scope reduces, it builds in horrific momentum. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie CollinAug 24, 2017
Once the significant shock of the film fades, what stays with you are its implications – the way it shows division digging in and self-perpetuating like cancer in bone, with each flare-up making the next more grimly probable. This is history retold in the blistering present tense. Read full review
80
Total FilmJamie GrahamJul 31, 2017
"Dunkirk" has a rival in the intensity stakes. Expect Bigelow’s deep-cutting drama to be part of the conversation come awards season. Read full review
80
EmpireSimon CrookJul 27, 2017
A gruelling, nightmarish, ferociously vivid riot epic that recreates one of the darkest chapters in American history. Unflinching, unmissable and terrifyingly pertinent. Read full review
80
VoxAlissa WilkinsonJul 26, 2017
The reason films like Detroit are important isn’t just because they remind us that the more things change, the more they stay the same; it’s because watching them forces us to tread moral ground alongside the characters. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawJul 26, 2017
This is a sombre, grieving movie which appears to gesture to the ghost-town ruin that is still in Detroit’s future. Read full review
80
Screen DailyTim GriersonJul 23, 2017
This gritty, gripping movie starts slowly but builds in intensity, culminating in sorrow and raw nerves. Read full review
75
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallAug 3, 2017
We are "there" although Detroit squanders that sensation on revulsion, a gut punch needing to take more shots at our heads. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliAug 3, 2017
Detroit, despite its flaws, is compelling and deeply unsettling. Its thriller and horror elements gain resonance because, at least to some degree, they’re based on real events. Read full review
75
Philadelphia Daily NewsGary ThompsonAug 2, 2017
When we finally leave the hotel, the movie’s energy is spent. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeTy BurrAug 2, 2017
Lines are drawn and connections are made. The intentions are pure. The results are enraging, often in accordance with the filmmakers’ hopes, sometimes against. Personally, I came out of Detroit angrier than I’ve been at a movie in ages, and not entirely the way director Kathryn Bigelow probably wants. Read full review
75
IndieWireDavid EhrlichJul 23, 2017
Detroit is extremely powerful when its wandering eye is trained on the moment at hand, when it’s performing a bracingly direct meditation on white violence and black fear. The film only runs into trouble when it clumsily attempts to contextualize the events of its horrific second act. Read full review
71
Paste MagazineWill LeitchAug 3, 2017
It’s an overwhelming horror movie—maybe a little too overwhelming. Read full review
70
Village VoiceBilge EbiriAug 1, 2017
Bigelow has crafted a portrait of the 1967 Detroit uprising that manages to be both history lesson and incendiary device, even if it sometimes sputters. Read full review
70
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJul 31, 2017
The problem for Detroit is that, when contrivance is required, it tends to jut out... Where the movie scores, by contrast, is in those casual deeds that reveal the shape into which lives have been bent. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJul 31, 2017
Bigelow and Boal don’t bring much moral complexity to Detroit. They don’t illuminate the psyches of the cops or suggest the fundamental feeling of weakness that drives people to violence. They don’t shed much light on Dismukes’s inaction or subsequent thoughts about what he didn’t do. What Bigelow does — incomparably — is put us in that room with those people at that moment. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJul 26, 2017
The film’s struggle against simplification — against the sentimentality, wishful thinking and outright denial that defines most Hollywood considerations of America’s racial past — is palpable, almost heroic, even if it is not always successful. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyJul 23, 2017
Intense and physically powerful in the way it conveys its atrocious events, the film nonetheless remains short on complexity, as if it were enough simply to provoke and outrage the audience. It's a grim tale with no catharsis. Read full review
67
The Film StageMichael SnydelAug 16, 2017
It insists on being on the right side of history, but is so concerned with portraying the extent of the violence that it forgets about victims in the process. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerAug 4, 2017
If the film had focused on more than the Algiers Motel incident, if, as it starts out to do, it had attempted to convey a comprehensive and incendiary portrait of a city in crisis, it would have rendered far more justice to those times – and our own. Read full review
67
The PlaylistRyan OliverJul 27, 2017
While Detroit may try and cover too much ground, thus occasionally stumbling on its ambition, the sheer visceral power of Bigelow’s direction is worth championing. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy VishnevetskyJul 26, 2017
It comes across as incomplete, its metaphors, bit characters, traumas, and tacked-on subplots never threading together into a larger canvas—a “big picture” movie where only the most tightly cornered, claustrophobic moments seem finished. Read full review
65
IGNWilliam BibbianiAug 3, 2017
Kathryn Bigelow's new docudrama Detroit emphasizes immediacy and brutality over historical context. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineEric HendersonJul 29, 2017
Kathryn Bigelow hyper-realistically, almost dispassionately, covers her ensemble’s actions in the manner of a somber disaster film. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJul 25, 2017
A handful of films, from "The Battle of Algiers" to Paul Greengrass' splendid "Bloody Sunday," have met the challenge of dramatizing civil unrest and law enforcement outrages, memorably. Detroit comes close. Read full review
60
ScreenCrushE. Oliver WhitneyAug 5, 2017
Detroit suffers from muddled intentions and a lack of a clear why. It could have maintained a narrower focus on the lives of the black folks affected by the motel incident. Instead, Detroit tries to accomplish too much too cautiously. Read full review
50
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenAug 2, 2017
Rarely has a movie been more urgently needed than Detroit, yet after delivering on its promise for nearly the entire first half, Detroit goes down in flames before it’s over. Read full review
50
TimeStephanie ZacharekJul 31, 2017
A well-intentioned picture, it’s also a flawed one. This is filmmaking that sets out to make its points but fails, in big ways and small ones, to forge an emotional connection with most of its characters. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comAngelica Jade BastienJul 28, 2017
Detroit was directed, written, produced, shot, and edited by white creatives who do not understand the weight of the images they hone in on with an unflinching gaze. Read full review
40
We Got This CoveredMatt DonatoAug 5, 2017
Detroit is, for lack of a better term, a pornographic echo chamber of resentment. Trying to put out a fire with ten more tankers full of gasoline. Read full review
38
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)John SemleyAug 3, 2017
And that’s how Detroit unfolds: like a horror film. The film flattens its historical personages and its particularities of time-and-place into excruciating exploitation – somewhere between a Straw Dogs-style “survive the night” home invasion narrative, Milgram experiment moral problem play and racial torture porn. Read full review
36
The AtlanticChristopher OrrJan 9, 2018
What begins as a shocking portrait of police misconduct gradually becomes a test of audience endurance. Read full review
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