60
While hardly reinventing the wheel, Blood works best as a tone poem, with unspoken passages detailing a hard life.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
40
Village Voice by Chris Packham
Blood wants to be a Greek tragedy about family loyalties, guilt, and the fall of a dynasty, but the characters never manage to connect with one another, separated by gulfs of melodramatic angst and the plot demands of a boringly unspooled police procedural.
25
Themes of family ties, obsession, and morality, so dramatically realized in Conviction, are gracelessly and shapelessly strewn together here.
40
Originality may be out of Blood's jurisdiction, but it manages to plod on, dutifully walking a tired old beat.
75
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
This move is both redundant and counterproductive because it weakens one of the screenplay’s central conceits — the way Bettany’s guilt is shared and experienced by other characters.
30
Los Angeles Times by Mark Olsen
Blood feels perfunctory, needing something besides fussy plotting to jolt it to life.
60
All four of the main performances are so strong that they deserve more space to develop and intertwine. Instead, at times, Blood plays like one long “previously on” montage for the series that inspired it.
67
The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton
A smart, well-acted and well-directed picture that adds up to a little more than the sum of its parts.
40
The film’s family-saga pretensions and bombastically overdone characterisation keep hobbling its better elements.