Your Company
 

Once Were Warriors

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

New Zealand · 1994
Rated R · 1h 42m
Director Lee Tamahori
Starring Rena Owen, Temuera Morrison, Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell, Julian Arahanga
Genre Drama

A powerful and savage drama about a Maori family living in Auckland, New Zealand. Lee Tamahori tells the story of Beth Heke’s strong will to keep her family from fracturing during times of unemployment and abuse from her violent and alcoholic husband. An uncompromising look at a culture disappearing into the urban cityscape.

Stream Once Were Warriors

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

88

ReelViews by James Berardinelli

Once Were Warriors works, to some degree, on three levels: the visceral, the emotional, and the intellectual, and it is the amalgamation of these that makes this a memorable film.

88

New York Daily News by Jami Bernard

Once Were Warriors has more to say than the traditional TV-movie about spousal abuse. But some viewers will have to pay a price: This is a movie that requires strength and fortitude to sit through.

70

The New York Times by Janet Maslin

A brutally effective family drama. Rough around the edges and crudely obvious at times, it still presents a raw, disturbing story of domestic strife.

75

Washington Post by Rita Kempley

An uncompromising, emotionally draining drama that presents the urbanization of New Zealand's Maori as a cultural disaster, one that is mirrored in the shards of a shattering marriage. This explosive first film by director Lee Tamahori focuses on the transformation of a battered wife, but its story is fueled by the machismo of the disenfranchised Maori male.

88

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The director's key achievement is creating a convincing sense of daily life in the household and neighborhood. This is not a narrow drama that focuses on a few themes; it paints a whole style of life, the good times with the bad.

Users who liked this film also liked