The Bad Batch
Screen Media Films | Release Date: June 23, 2017 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
62
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 25 Critic Reviews
Positive:
12
Mixed:
12
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinSep 6, 2016
Its salvaged parts combine into an internally incongruous but crazily unique whole. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJun 22, 2017
It is a fluent and knowing pastiche of genres and styles with a brazen and vigorous wit of its own. Read full review
90
Village VoiceApril WolfeJun 22, 2017
No matter how confounding the story gets, details and humor ground the narrative, and a simple guiding premise about the importance of human connection and artistic expression fills in the blanks. Read full review
83
IndieWireEric KohnSep 6, 2016
The Bad Batch further solidifies the strength of Amirpour’s idiosyncratic vision, which takes familiar details and bends them into spiky bursts of unpredictability. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleJosh KupeckiJun 21, 2017
Amirpour could have reined in her penchant for laconic coolness at times, but where’s the fun in that? This fractured fairy tale of the marginalized have-nots and the bonds they forge continues the director’s obsession for the genre films she grew up with while adding her own contemporary sensibilities, and the result is an ultimately satisfying journey. Read full review
75
MTV NewsAmy NicholsonJun 22, 2017
This is the type of fantasy that admits its characters get sunburned and dirty and need to, er, use the bathroom. It takes a female director to allow her female star to be this un-vain. Amirpour would rather be bold than beautiful. Read full review
75
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanJun 22, 2017
In addition to presenting a parable about the collapse of society, Amirpour’s film is also a kind of postmodern Adam-and-Eve story. Read full review
75
The Film StageRory O'ConnorSep 6, 2016
There is a great deal to savor here and yet it’s hard to shake the sense that The Bad Batch is a film stuck in neutral. We await that kick into a higher gear but it’s just too cool to be bothered. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 6, 2016
Even when the dramatic momentum slackens, the movie's grindhouse world remains vividly rendered and immersive. Read full review
63
Rolling StonePeter TraversJun 22, 2017
Amirpour dips into an seemingly bottomless supply of signs and symbols to show us an imploding society all too recognizable as our own, and you'll marvel at hallucinatory brilliance of her images. Yet The Bad Batch never finds a way to fuse its scattered intentions into a cohesive whole. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Julia CooperJun 22, 2017
No character goes unscathed in this brutally violent movie, but Amirpour is especially careless with her black subjects – a painful misstep in an otherwise clear-eyed, unflinching critique of American despotism. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineChuck BowenJun 18, 2017
Ana Lily Amirpour has learned a few lessons from QT about the disreputable joys of blending kitsch and ultraviolence. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangJun 22, 2017
Amirpour has vision to burn, and inside this not-so-bad batch of splendid atmospherics and half-baked ideas is a leaner, sharper movie trying to chew its way out. Read full review
60
VarietyGuy LodgeSep 6, 2016
Though there’s much to savor in the pic’s lavishly distressed visuals and soundscape, its narrative feels increasingly stretched and desultory. Read full review
60
The GuardianAndrew PulverSep 6, 2016
The film doesn’t quite live up to its creepy, savage opening, or carry through its best ideas. Read full review
50
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJun 27, 2017
The writer and director, Ana Lily Amirpour, delivers this imaginative tale as a simplistic allegory of the haves and the have-nots; she ruefully delights in the wasteland’s postindustrial wreckage while leaving characters’ thoughts and motives blank. Read full review
50
TheWrapTricia OlszewskiJun 23, 2017
The Bad Batch feels less like a coherent film and more like a pastiche. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJun 22, 2017
The talented writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour raises the crazy stakes with a well-made, sometimes darkly funny and at times bizarrely entertaining film that eventually falls apart due to directorial self-indulgence, excessive grotesquery, a bloated running time, too many half-baked messages—and let’s not forget the distractingly campy appearances by Keanu Reeves and Jim Carrey. Read full review
50
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJun 22, 2017
While it’s visually arresting, it’s a disappointment. It’s too on the nose as a political allegory, and too lacking in coherent narrative to satisfy as a hipster comedy-drama. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubKatie RifeJun 21, 2017
Trouble is, it’s still 2017, and although our culture keeps getting more intensely ironic all the time, we’re not quite yet to the point where this level of artifice is easily digestible. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeTy BurrJun 21, 2017
Amirpour has the potential to see things as no other filmmaker does, but she doesn’t yet have a vision, and she may not as long as she keeps fiddling around with genre conventions laid down by others. She’s an eccentric magpie of a director, and this time the pieces she collects glitter but never quite cohere. Read full review
50
The PlaylistJessica KiangSep 6, 2016
The perils of the broader-canvas follow-up to the sleek and economical indie debut are writ large: this is “Difficult Second Album: The Movie.” Read full review
40
Screen DailyLee MarshallSep 6, 2016
After the tense opening, coherent drama goes by the board. Read full review
40
CineVueJohn BleasdaleSep 6, 2016
Amirpour is a talented director with a wonderful eye but her style lacks substance and her obvious influences - the Mad Max franchise and the wonderful LQ Jones film A Boy and his Dog - are so superior as to almost completely nullify her derivative contribution to the genre. Read full review
25
RogerEbert.comAngelica Jade BastienJun 23, 2017
Violence in The Bad Batch has neither artistic nor narrative purpose. Read full review
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