| Focus Features | Release Date: November 6, 2020 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
27
Mixed:
7
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianNov 5, 2020
Nov 2, 2020
Let Him Go isn’t subtle, but as a genre film it’s original and shrewdly made, with a floridly gripping suspense. And Lane and Costner give it their all in a casual way that only pros this seasoned and gifted can. They turn the movie into an unlikely thing: a touchingly bone-weary romance steeped in vengeance.
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Nov 6, 2020
Lane and Costner are swell, but the film jolts to life the second we walk into Blanche’s dimly lit kitchen, occupied by even dimmer men. The villainous Manville acts like a rooster, clucking, crowing and, worst of all, pecking. A sickening scene in a motel won’t have you taking the kids to South Dakota anytime soon.
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Nov 5, 2020
As an instrument of righteousness and retribution, Let Him Go can feel both familiar and at times shockingly brutal, especially in its final climactic moments. Still, there's blunt power in the execution, most of it concentrated in Bezucha's moody big-sky atmosphere, and in the seasoned professionals he's found to tell the tale.
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Movie NationNov 5, 2020
Let It Go is a thriller best-appreciated for its trio of tour de force performances — for Diane Lane and Kevin Costner’s understated Western American couple that’s so familiar and lived-in that their most powerful moments are wordless, and for Great Brit Lesley Manville’s furious, uncompromising North Dakota matriarch.
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Nov 4, 2020
Nov 7, 2020
The patient, somber direction gives the characters — and the actors playing them — room to breathe. It lets them do the things they’re best at: Costner gets to be the sad dad. Diane Lane gets to be passionate. And Lesley Manville gets to eat up the screen. For all its surface simplicity, Let Him Go is a surprising emotional roller coaster, and it stays with you.
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Nov 2, 2020
It’s a throwback slow-burn thriller and an over-the-top scenery-chewing buffet — sometimes in the same scene. The back-and-forth tone prevents it from being the serious examination of human behavior (and misbehavior) it believes itself to be. It makes the experience of watching more strange than immersive.
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SlashfilmNov 2, 2020
Great as our actual dads might be, they simply cannot compete with Costner. The guy perfectly hits all the right notes: honesty, dignity, quiet reserve, rugged Americana – all qualities we want in a hyperbolic father figure. Let Him Go exploits all this and reminds us of one other thing he’s good at: ass-kicking.
But Let Him Go isn’t really Costner’s movie. Instead, it belongs to Diane Lane as his wife.
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Nov 2, 2020
Writer-director Thomas Bezucha, adapting a novel by Larry Watson, shows remarkable patience in developing this low-key rescue mission — or maybe he just assumes that he’s courting an older audience who won’t need much prompting to side with Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, but will enjoy extra time with them all the same.
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Nov 5, 2020
Both Lane and Costner, direct and earthy performers from the start, have only added depth with age. As long-married Montana ranchers in Let Him Go (in theaters Friday), they’re basically the platonic ideal of an old-fashioned, homespun Americana. They could sell you a mountain of jeans if they wanted to.
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Nov 3, 2020
Rescuing Jimmy (and possibly Lorna) from a possessive, abusive husband would have been plenty of drama for this hitherto quiet, sensitive picture. Instead we get a family full of leering thugs, whose depiction sometimes suggests they might have a cousin out in the barn who dresses in other people's flesh. The action doesn't get quite that extreme, but it's bad enough.
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IndieWireNov 2, 2020
Here is a tanned hide of a movie about the violence that results from conflicting ideas of what this country should be, and while the writer/director of “The Family Stone” lacks the chops to tell this story with the suspense it demands (or the hard-nosed focus required to mine something new from the myth it deconstructs), he fully understands the symbolic power of seeing these actors lose something they can never get back.
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Nov 5, 2020
The pace is deadly slow, the style old-fashioned and the acting devoid of spontaneity. These are skilled actors, but the writing is so threadbare — an important character from the novel has been eliminated — and the direction (by Thomas Bezucha, working from his own adaptation) is so lacking in nuance that genuine dramatic energy gets lost by the wayside during the road trip to North Dakota.
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