Hostiles
Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: December 22, 2017 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
65
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 41 Critic Reviews
Positive:
23
Mixed:
15
Negative:
3
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyDec 20, 2017
Westerns can be a tough nut to crack, but Hostiles may be the finest example of the genre since "Unforgiven." Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranDec 21, 2017
Once feared dead but found instead only sleeping, the western has sprung back to strong and compelling life with the intense, involving Hostiles being the latest case in point. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonJan 25, 2018
If you’ve got a hankering for a Western, Hostiles is must-viewing. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJan 4, 2018
Hostiles is not for the faint of heart, but it winds up being about having a heart in a world that seems almost without hope. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversDec 27, 2017
Bale, in a piercing, quietly devastating performance, holds the film's center with commanding authority. It's a film whose brute force tempered with contemplative grace. It's a potent and prodigious achievement. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 19, 2017
The movie, written for the screen and directed by Scott Cooper (who helmed Jeff Bridges’ Oscar-winning performance in "Crazy Heart"), is careful not to demonize anyone and make the path to redemption both slow and methodical. Read full review
80
Total FilmJames MottramJan 20, 2018
Cooper’s western may be too meditative for some, but its grit, beauty and honesty are too potent to ignore. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternJan 19, 2018
Most powerfully about what violence does to the soul: Joe is almost dead to the world, and to himself. Not quite, though. This harshly beautiful film is equally about his regeneration during the course of a journey that amounts to a parable of humanity trying to climb out of the pit of endless slaughter and retribution. Read full review
80
EmpireDan JolinDec 29, 2017
A finely crafted Western which doesn’t flinch from portraying the horrors inflicted during that violent era, and which boasts an astounding performance from Christian Bale. Read full review
80
Time OutTomris LafflyDec 21, 2017
At times, you'll find yourself wanting more of the perspective of the Cheyenne, but Cooper still does right by his story of historical reconciliation, charting Blocker’s moral transformation plausibly. Hostiles‘ disarming finale packs an earned, radiantly optimistic punch. Read full review
80
The New York TimesA.O. ScottDec 21, 2017
Hostiles itself wants to be both a throwback and an advance, not so much a new kind of western as every possible kind — vintage, revisionist, elegiac, feminist. What makes the movie interesting is the sincerity and intelligence with which it pursues that ambition, heroically unaware that the mission is doomed from the start. Read full review
80
TheWrapJames GreenbergDec 19, 2017
Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s mournful meditation on human nature, is more than a revisionist Western; it’s a film that explores the roots of racism and the cost of redemption. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthy
Contemplative and absorbing rather than rip-roaring and exciting, the film will likely play better to Western connoisseurs than to general and younger audiences, but it's an estimable piece of work grounded by a fine-grain sensibility and an expertly judged lead performance. Read full review
75
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Brad WheelerJan 18, 2018
Like Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven," the underlying tension involves the protagonist's journey to regain his humanity. Hostiles, a hotbed of hostility. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayJan 17, 2018
With his hard-bitten squint and studied air of scowling detachment, Bale seems to be channeling Clint Eastwood at his most enigmatic and reserved; like Eastwood and his characters, Bale allows both the camera and his fellow characters to come to him, rather than proving his bona fides through more obvious and eager means. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedDec 27, 2017
Fortunately, this is a filmmaker as talented as he is brave and stubborn. Hostiles breathes fresh oxygen into a genre as old as a Confederate cough. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comGodfrey CheshireDec 22, 2017
The film has a lot going for it. Besides the gorgeous, burnished look supplied by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, Cooper gets a range of fine performances from a topnotch cast. Read full review
70
Screen DailyAllan Hunter
Hostiles demands patience and concentration but rewards that with an assured, thought-provoking window into a past whose legacy is still being felt to this day. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerJan 26, 2018
The actors, who also include Rosamund Pike as a woman whose family was massacred by the Comanche, and Ben Foster, as a member of the military who killed an American Indian family, are all strikingly good. Read full review
67
ConsequenceDominick Suzanne-MayerJan 7, 2018
It’s a sparse film, to be sure, but one authentic to the time in which it takes place, even if that authenticity reads in a significantly different light in our own time. Read full review
67
IndieWireDavid Ehrlich
This is a proudly traditional oater that travels down old trails with new sadism, as though the Western genre only died off because the movies weren’t cruel enough. Read full review
63
The Associated PressLindsey BahrJan 11, 2018
Bursts of intense violence are punctuated with sometimes tedious blocks of speeches and silence, but Hostiles, despite its posture of brutal amorality, has a goodness at its core, of understanding and empathy. It also has something that so many sequel and franchise-hungry studios today wouldn’t dare show — an actual ending. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 4, 2018
It’s Blocker’s story, and Bale’s very good. But for Hostiles to fully make sense of its introductory on-screen D.H. Lawrence quotation — “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” — we’d need a tougher, less comforting ending than the one Cooper provides. Read full review
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