Sweet Country

Uncompromising, deliberate, and eerily beautiful, director Warwick Thornton's rugged Australian Western puts a new spin on an old story.

If the movie's outlook is less than hopeful, it nevertheless suggests that there is still time to learn from our mistakes.

Australia now has its High Noon.

Spare, deliberately paced, and almost Biblical in its search for moral justice in a harsh and lawless landscape.

A movie of visuals first and foremost.

While Sweet Country snakes along to an inevitable outcome, Thornton retains a sharp control over the movie's ravishing visuals, assembling them with a rhythmic quality that transcends any specific time and place.

A story of racism and violence, poetic, serene and full of fury. [Full review in Spanish]

Altogether, Thornton's film is a moody and dark meditation -- a grim portrait of an Old West that will be both familiar and foreign to American audiences.

It's deliberately paced yet rewards patience, building to a resolution that's both harrowing and heartbreaking.

As harshly beautiful as its landscape, this is a stark corrective to the American western it echoes, and a pragmatic confrontation with the deep, tenacious roots of modern racism.

It manages to be both timeless and perfectly of the moment.

Thornton sets the stage carefully, sometimes snapping us into flashbacks and flash-forwards that only become clear the second time we see them.