Variety‘s Justin Chang and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Todd McCarthy have reviewed Cary Fukanaga‘s Beasts of No Nation, which screened today at the Venice Film Festival. Both critics agree that it’s riveting to sit through — a beautifully captured if somewhat traumatizing portrait of a child’s experience of guerilla warfare in Africa, and is therefore no one’s idea of an easy sit or an engaging exotic adventure, much less a date movie. But Idris Elba might have a shot at acting honors, although McCarthy and Chang don’t mention a possible category. I’ve been told that Elba’s role is more of supporting than lead, but what do I know?
Chang calls Beasts an “artful, accomplished but not entirely sustained adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s 2005 debut novel, never quite finding an ideal cinematic equivalent for the singular spareness and ferocity of the author’s prose. By turns lucid and a bit logy, and undeniably overlong, it’s nevertheless the rare American movie to enter a distant land and emerge with a sense of lived-in human experience rather than a well-meaning Third World postcard.”
McCarthy notes that while Fukanaga’s two previous features “also dealt with brutalizing rites of passage suffered by young people — Central Americans making their way through Mexico to the U.S. border in Sin Nombre, a 19th century English orphan girl’s harsh life in Jane Eyre — Beasts rates as the most disturbing of the three because of the way the pre-pubescent boy at its center is forced to become a ruthless killer.”
