Reseñas de la crítica

This is an often shoulder-shudderingly funny film, whose comic dialogue is dazzlingly designed and performed. But McDonagh leaves fate itself with the last, black, bone-rattling laugh.

McDonagh sets up a central dynamic that’s seductive in its binary simplicity: What’s more important, to be loved or to be great? To be smart or to be kind? Nice or interesting? The fact that the choice is a false one is but a quibble within the filmmaker’s larger project, which is to put his characters in a purgatory of his own making and prod them while they squirm.

McDonagh’s portrait of a community in petty crisis finds him operating in modes unknown to his filmography up until now. The pronounced melancholy infects supporting players... and acts at fascinating odds against the beautiful, wide vistas of the countryside. The tone regularly shifts into a surreal daze, occasionally slipping over the line into the aesthetics and mood of folk horror... It’s a breakup movie pushed to the absolute limit.

In “Banshees,” Gleeson and Farrell once again are pure movie magic together... yet it’s Kerry Condon in arguably the best work of her career who continually steals our attentions as Siobhán... This is one of the best movies of the year.

An end-of-friendship breakup movie that swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion... As for the cast, they are a note-perfect ensemble, a flawless instrument upon which McDonagh plays his deliciously melancholy danse macabre.

[The Banshees of Inisherin] isn’t so much a return to form as a re-circling back to [McDonagh's] original subjects, and maybe original sins: an elliptical, almost folklorish story of men in crisis doubling as a portrait of a nation in existential turmoil... McDonagh has also crafted what may be his most mature, if somewhat mysterious work about the agony and ecstasy of moving on.

The Banshees of Inisherin is as good as it gets... nothing short of a marvel... Prepare yourself for a film as freshly observed as it is hard to watch. Best of all, it’s a film notable for the rare opportunity to show Colin Farrell’s remarkable range and talent in ways you never see in Hollywood action vehicles.

[The film] makes for immensely entertaining storytelling, and he’s at his best in this distinctly Irish setting. Reuniting Gleeson and Farrell, whose odd-couple pairing rendered the gothic crime comedy of In Bruges so unforgettable, was the right choice.

Nobody does self-loathing like the Irish, and with this film, McDonagh is on much surer footing than he was when trying to tell America a thing or two with his film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” in 2017... Very good show all around.

If “The Banshees of Inisherin” marks a significant improvement on the wildly uneven “Three Billboards,” it still doesn’t entirely shake off some of the reflexively glib, cynical aspects of McDonagh’s writing, namely his tendency to reduce some of his characters to one-note personalities, or to make them the butt of cruel comic (and sometimes cosmic) punchlines.

[The Banshees of Inisherin] is bleak and brutal—and deeply affecting... It’s a triumph of the same kind of harsh minimalism that fueled his [plays]... [and] a testament to [McDonagh, Farrell, and Gleeson's] collaborative power and a peek into how a storyteller’s approach to his main creative themes—redemption and loneliness—evolves over time.

McDonagh’s latest is heart-wrenching in its simplicity, dark-humoured and unadorned in its sentiments. It’s a film equal to In Bruges – perhaps even more effective in the way its relative restraint presents brutality as humdrum... The Banshees of the Inisherin is really a beautiful work to behold.