Critics reviews

The Good Boy might well serve as a teachable example of what a film gains from having good actors commit to silly, vaguely disreputable material.

Like A Clockwork Orange reimagined in the age of TikTok... [Good Boy] can be a gruesome watch, hinging on the question of who is the more sociopathic: the hooligan Tommy or the soft-voiced disciplinarian with the Taser — a question that Komasa rightly declines to answer.

This oddball thriller about moral conditioning has a great cast... But the story, after a promising start, deserts them.

At 1 hour and 50 minutes, [Good Boy] does lag a bit in the third act, but it remains engaging nonetheless. In the midst of the strange and provocative premise are fantastic performances from all the powerhouse actors, which manage to avoid falling into caricature

The Good Boy aspires to be a twisted fable of damaged individuals, but it can’t bring itself to mine the depths of human intimacy and cruelty the way a Haneke film would seek to disturb us. In fact the torture itself is excruciatingly tame.

Good Boy is tonally unique, but there are shades of Phantom Thread here — only with familial instead of romantic love gone sideways. The cast gives career-best performances and has electric chemistry.

Jan Komasa keeps the tension bubbling nicely in a story that feels like a latter-day riposte to A Clockwork Orange. The final act doesn't quite pay off, with characters' motives left frustratingly opaque, but the film is blessed with cast-iron performances, especially from Graham and Boon.

[A] bold and weirdly poignant black comedy... If the set-up isn’t outrageously original, with shades of Misery and A Clockwork Orange, it’s stylishly directed by the Polish film-maker Jan Komasa... and the actors are rarely less than captivating.

[Good Boy] begins promisingly but teases more than it delivers... It’s lifted by some very convincing performances. Boon takes a believable path from horrible thug to horrible thug with self-awareness. Graham and Riseborough are playing almost one-note characters, but play that note with sinister effectiveness.

Boon’s performance finds sympathy in Tommy’s journey without sanding down his horrible behaviour... Graham’s understated everyman and Riseborough’s just-off-kilter portrait of normal are equally captivating... Filled with thought-provoking twists and quandaries, Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid’s script never picks easy answers.

Heel might shout its themes directly at the audience, but that’s less important than the clever and thoughtful thriller it becomes.

“Heel” is like “A Clockwork Orange” remade as the year’s worst Sundance movie... [The film] is just a grimy monotonous conceit. It’s been thought out thematically but not in terms of recognizable human behavior. It’s like a film-student short stretched out to an agonizing 110 minutes.