63
Film Journal International by André Hereford
It cannot, unfortunately, boast a taut pace and narrative to match the mood of unease that fills the air like dust in this depressed desert outpost.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
61
Paste Magazine by Andrew Crump
The film’s vistas are beautiful and Matthews’s aim, high, but those aspirations are not fully realized in what feels like a first draft attempt at brushing Western customs with textures drawn from a South African palette.
75
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Five Fingers of Marseilles is simultaneously familiar and unique. As befits a film set in an isolated corner of the pre-and-post-Apartheid country, the movie incorporates its contemporaneous circumstances into the plot.
75
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Everything you want from a western thematically is present with arch stereotypes of good and evil prevalent but never detrimental to the characters.
80
Five Fingers for Marseilles turns out to be an impressively effective and engrossing cross-cultural hybrid that has a great deal more than novelty value going for it.
50
What happens in this neo-western isn't dictated by the tried and true themes of classic westerns but by the films themselves.
80
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Crust
The ending is both shocking and inevitable. Drummond and Matthews honor the western traditions, classic, spaghetti and revisionist, while creating something stylishly original steeped in the seldom-seen rural and tribal cultures of South Africa.
50
RogerEbert.com by Matt Fagerholm
There are no thrills in this western yarn, just a mounting series of tragedies that are by turns frustrating and numbing.
75
Five Fingers for Marseilles is a modern day Western, a tale of revolutionary South Africa and its aftermath, a world of blood, revenge, “stepping in” to right a great wrong, and fighting back. It’s a Sotho “Shane,” brutally beautiful and iconic, fraught with symbolism, harrowing in its violence and its consequences.
90
The New York Times by Teo Bugbee
In stylish and entertaining fashion, Five Fingers for Marseilles looks over the South African countryside and finds fresh vistas for the western genre.