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Australia · 2018
Rated R · 1h 53m
Director Warwick Thornton
Starring Hamilton Morris, Bryan Brown, Sam Neill, Thomas M. Wright
Genre Drama, History, Western
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Sam is a middle-aged Aboriginal man who works the land of a kind preacher, Fred, in Australia's Northern Territory. After an ill-tempered bully arrives in town and Sam kills him in self-defense, he and his wife go on the run as a posse gathers to hunt him down.
Poetically directed by Warwick Thornton, whose Samson & Delilah also threw a spotlight over aboriginal characters, Sweet Country has a shaggy, digressive eccentricity common to Ozploitation cinema, not to mention a humane understanding of its characters.
The Film Stage by Christopher Schobert
Thornton establishes himself as a director to watch, and with fine performances from Neill, Brown, Gorey-Furber, and, especially, Hamilton Morris, also reveals an ability to make an epic tale feel deeply personal.
The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.
Sweet Country is epic and personal, daring to tell a simple story in a challenging, arresting way. It’s a demanding two hours but leavened by great performances, especially from newcomer Hamilton Morris.
Sweet Country is unmistakably a western in iconography and spare, taciturn tone, but it is also an incendiary slave narrative, in which the poetry of the filmmaking can barely contain a simmering fury and disgust at this most shameful of human institutions.
Sweet Country is a hoarsely angry film, a powerful denunciation of the racism and violence on which modern Australia was eventually founded.
The beauty of Alice Springs offers a profound contrast with the ugly acts committed by its inhumane colonists.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Kate Taylor
The story is both fresh and archetypal; the landscape both hard and delicate – and beautifully observed. Memories and premonitions are intriguingly inserted into the action and the performances...are note perfect.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
This is fiercely powerful storytelling, simple and muscular in one way, but also conveying nuance and sophistication in its depiction of character.
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
Sweet Country is tough, spare and lyrical right down to the bone.... It is also a work of moral conscience that rules out easy answers, with acridly funny moments of black comedy and a sense of awesome natural spectacle that is inseparable from its dramatic impact. It has a power that makes the cinema shake.
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