Critical Reviews

[arnzilla]

Updated Regularly

metacritic
79
48 reviews/11 100s


rottentomatoes
83%
184 reviews


Critics Consensus: Silence ends Martin Scorsese's decades-long
creative quest with a thoughtful, emotionally resonant look at spirituality
and human nature that stands among the director's finest works.

[exrental]

Wells also had this to say: "I would not use the word "terrific." That makes it sound like it's a kapow fireworks whoo-whoo thing. What it has, and what it delivers (above and beyond the great cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto) is a spiritual current that sneaks up on you. I believe in "to each his own," and that goes for religion and moral order in this or that country or culture. I've never given the slightest damn about the legend of Christianity and the belief of so many in that arrogant fraternity that they're passing along the absolute light and truth and the shot at redemption as offered by Jesus and God the Father. So I felt no allegiance, no sympathy for all the people, Portugese Jesuit and Japanese natives alike, who suffer so horribly because of their refusal to refute Christ. But something curious and strange happens toward the end -- the last half-hour or so, maybe the last 40 -- that really got me. Silence is a long, tough, beautiful sit, but for all that difficulty it's one of Scorsese's masterworks (he's made a few), and at least five if not ten times better than Kundun. It's somewhat similar to The Last Temptation of Christ, certainly the last portion of that 1988 film, as both are about devout men of the spirit who give up the faith and then are left to face the consequences."

[Zotyto]

collider.com/silence-review/

Collider - ‘Silence’ Review: Martyrs by Trade (A-)


www.timeout.com/us/film/silence-2016

Time Out - ‘Silence’ Review (*****)

[exrental]

Todd McCarthy's Hollywood Reporter Review
www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/silence-review-954592

Variety
variety.com/2016/film/reviews/silence-review-martin-scorsese-1201935391/

Screen International
www.screendaily.com/reviews/silence-review/5111830.article?blocktitle=REVIEWS&contentID=40296

[will]

Thanks for these reviews.
Silence starts with 100% at rotten tomatoes:
www.rottentomatoes.com/m/silence_2016

[arnzilla]

Sasha Stone's review
Jeff Wells' review
NY Daily News - Stephen Whitty's 5/5 star review
The Telegraph - Robbie Collin's 5/5 star review
Awards Circuit - Clayton Davis' 4/4 star review

[arnzilla]

Uncultured Swine's Letterboxd SPOILER-FILLED review

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The New Yorker's Richard Brody

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Newsweeks's Tom Shone

Scorsese’s spirituality is usually most apparent when it appears as a metaphorical underlay or subtext. Looked at head-on, it tends to evaporate. The Last Temptation of Christ bristled with the director’s hot-headedness and street suss, but it came off as pumped-up, overcooked. His biographical movie about a Dalai Lama, Kundun, was magisterial, mellow—and fleeting. Silence, though , takes your head off—it is devotional cinema of an exacting and exalted sort, sprung with the paradoxes of faith and doubt that have bedevilled the director his entire career.

And yet the film demands to be seen. Ready yourself, choose your moment and don’t make plans for afterward: This film will not leave you alone just because you’ve left the cinema. For all that Hollywood specializes in flimsy bromides about the “triumph of the human spirit,” the genuine article is much more elusive. Yet here it is—stubborn, wily, unbeautiful—running right through the film like piano wire. Much of Scorsese’s later work has seemed like a maestro going through the motions: a great filmmaker in search of the grand obsession that drove his earlier films. Silence is his first work in a long time that registers the same urgency. The result feels close to a state of grace.

[Silencio]

www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/18/silence-scorsese-s-flawed-frustrating-white-savior-tries-to-save-japan-from-itself.html

Jen Yamato's shitty Hot Take.

[arnzilla]

Metro's Matt Prigge - December 19, 2016

When we say “Silence” is slow, we mean that as a high compliment. Its sense of pace is so steady, so assured that, as in the films of Bela Tarr, it almost changes our body chemistry just watching it. We settle into its groove and are jerked out of it only by the occasional, sudden burst of violence — or, in a rare moment of comic-ish relief during one of many grilling sessions, a bit where the body of the kindly, polite, Christoph Waltz-y head interrogator (Issey Ogata) seems to sink in on itself. (It’s hard to describe; you just have to see it and marvel.)

“Silence” is a new kind of movie, too. It is, for one thing, deeply unfashionable filmmaking. Scorsese’s latest enters theaters as a near-three-hour slow-burner, fighting off clangy, busy comic book movies and cartoons about talking, farting animals. It’s a religious movie about how doubt can strengthen one’s faith, fighting for believers’ dollars against cynical dreck like “God’s Not Dead 2,” which exploit and exacerbate fears of Christian victimization. It’s not even, apparently, much of an awards movie (read: Oscar bait). The fanfare for “Silence” is, indeed, quiet — suspiciously quiet, as though it were a harder sell than “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a three-hour hard-R bacchanalia that frontloaded a very famous actor smoking crack out of a hooker’s nether regions.

Perhaps it is a harder sell. It seems to exist alien to all other movies, even Scorsese’s. And as such, this film finds a storied filmmaker fighting for his chosen, allegedly dying medium’s greatness — and, at least in terms of quality, winning.

[arnzilla]

A.V. Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky - December 20, 2016

In Silence, he and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto largely avoid powerful camera movements, in keeping with the powerlessness of their central character.

Which is not say that the most rollicking of the great American directors has completely surrendered the aggressive qualities of his style. The opening title card, which cuts short a swell of cicadas, is a doozy, and the film’s use of telephoto lenses to stage shots with multiple characters is overtly reminiscent of Kurosawa. It could even be said that Silence is vaguely about cinema, in that sense that all Martin Scorsese movies are. The Last Temptation Of Christ, his other overtly religious work, subverted the 1950s ancient-times epics that the director has often spoken of being enthralled by as a child; Silence resists the pictorialism and sweep of a conventional historical drama, even as it can’t resist some of the genre’s oldest tropes. (The padres, for instance, all speak with Portuguese accents of varying consistency.) The two faiths, church and cinema, are intertwined; in an unusual bit of casting, Mokichi, the devout leader of an isolated Kirishtan community, is played by Shinya Tsukamoto, the cult filmmaker behind the likes of Tetsuo, The Iron Man and A Snake Of June.

[arnzilla]

I still don't know who Harvey Karten is and didn't know Compuserve still exists, but, as they say (whoever they are), whatevs.

A few concepts are implied. One is the idea that Jews have not been the only people to be persecuted for their religion off and on for two thousand years. Any minority group that is considered “the other,” risks torment by people who cannot tolerate differences. Remember that ISIS captures Yazidi women not only for their different religion but also because they are not, like Muslims, a people of the Book. And the Romans were not the last to bother Christians in the arena. Christians are persecuted today in some North African states, by ISIS, by Al Queda, and of course in the 17th Century by those who are the subjects of this film. If the action in this film reminds you of the ideology of terrorists, who destroy items of antiquity from non-Islamic religions as they did in Syria, you’re up with your current events. All this makes “Silence” not only a film to be seen for intrinsic qualities and careful attention to detail but for its timeliness not only for our own century but throughout history.

[arnzilla]

NY Magazine's David Edelstein - December 20, 2016

What won’t be controversial is the poetry and economy of Scorsese’s filmmaking, the chiaroscuro intensity of Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, and the sublimity — a word that encompasses both beauty and horror — of the coastal settings where men and women meet their deaths. The contrast between Garfield’s and Driver’s visages could hardly be more powerful: the first with small, fine features, the second with outsize protuberances worthy of Goya. Given his starring role as a conscientious objector in Hacksaw Ridge, this is the second time in the last two months in which Garfield has found himself courting religious martyrdom amid extreme carnage, his face a mask of suffering. He has hereby earned the right to do two or three lousy but high-paying rom-coms without a peep of complaint.

[arnzilla]

National Catholic Register's Steven D. Greydanus

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church,” Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) tells the magistrate and grand inquisitor Inoue (Issey Ogata) in Martin Scorsese’s shattering adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s Silence.

Rodrigues is quoting, of course, the famous boast of the early Christian writer Tertullian, which epitomizes the Christian idealization of martyrdom, so near the center of Christian self-understanding.

This sensibility — often blending piety and defiance, inspiration and bravado, even self-sacrificing devotion and self-promoting PR — was rooted in pre-Christian Jewish memory as well as Christian experience of persecution, first under Jewish authorities and especially under pagan Rome. Above all, of course, it was rooted in the passion and crucifixion of Jesus.

This good to know before seeing the film. My Tertullian is, I'm ashamed to say, a bit rusty.

While I am (to put it mildly) no fan of Last Temptation, I did note, writing about it 15 years ago, that it was a film I could only imagine a Catholic director making. Now Scorsese has made another intensely Catholic film — one that I find almost as difficult as Last Temptation, but which draws me in as powerfully as Last Temptation repels me.

In a way it draws me in like a sore tooth one can’t stop probing with one’s tongue, like a painful memory that rises unbidden in one’s mind, stubbornly unresolved. Like Of Gods and Men, but much more so, Silence tells no one exactly what they want to hear, except those who can hear nothing else.

Here's Greydanus' review of Last Temptation.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto paints Japan as a world shrouded in mist and shadow, overgrown with dense forests. The score by husband-and-wife composers Kim Allen Kluge and Kathryn Kluge is a daring ambient skein of breaking waves, insect and bird songs and other natural sounds blended with subtle instrumental effects.

Notably, Rodrigues seems initially stronger and more disciplined in his faith than Garupe (Garrpe in the novel), who struggles more with misgivings and failings. “You’re a bad Jesuit,” Rodrigues chides Garupe with a smile. Sometimes, though, weakness proves stronger than strength.

Tertullian’s boast about the blood of martyrs was penned in an era of bread and circuses, in which believers willing to suffer and die for the faith could show the crowds what they were made of. In Japan, by contrast, authorities quickly learned that trying to make dramatic public examples of individual believers backfired. Now they made them suffer ignominiously, away from the public gaze.

“Smite the shepherd,” wrote the prophet Zechariah, “and the sheep will be scattered.” Not only have the Japanese inquisitors learned this lesson, they’ve also learned an insidious inverse principle: To break the shepherd, smite the sheep.

Tertullian again!!! Why do you persecute me so???