Critics reviews

Barnard's vivid eye for detail and love for chiaroscuro produces contrasted and wondrous imagery. Filled with dualisms (nature, junkyard metal; boys, men) The Selfish Giant takes the tone of a fable, warning of the fragility of life.

Barnard realizes the settings in immersive detail, and she elicits some strikingly convincing performances from her cast; Conner Chapman, playing a boy with an untreated behavioral disorder, delivers one of the scariest performances I've seen from a child actor. The movie takes its title and narrative structure from a children's story by Oscar Wilde; as in the Dardenne brothers' The Kid With a Bike, the fairy-tale elements bolster the contemporary story with a sense of timelessness.

The Selfish Giant is easy to admire but difficult to recommend, because its vision of friendship, poverty and desperation is so stark.

Every moment in this film is alive with possibility, with the chance that everything will go haywire in a new way.

[Chapman and Thomas] deliver surprisingly powerful performances, driving the film forward with a palpable—and at times heart-wrenching—energy that overrides the screenplay's minor flaws. The physicality of the overgrown Swifty and exceptionally runty Arbor make them a particularly endearing odd couple to watch, and their friendship feels real, from start to tragic finish... The film's final image completes a full visual circle that is sure to make even the stiffest upper lip quiver with emotion.

While the British media have understandably drawn a comparison to Loach's groundbreaking 1969 British film "Kes," Barnard is just as much following in the footsteps of François Truffaut's "The 400 Blows," [and] Vittorio De Sica's "Bicycle Thieves"... I advise you to brace yourself; like those films, "The Selfish Giant" may tear your heart out. But the passion and possibility Barnard shows us among forgotten people in a forgotten place are fully worth it.

Patiently accumulating vivid details, [Barnard] executes a slow boil that culminates in tragedy, yet the movie avoids feeling like a dose of British miserabilism, if only because everybody on-screen (including a host of supporting characters with nicknames like Price Drop) seems so aggressively alive.

Mike Eley's gorgeously saturated cinematography helps elevate the boys' struggle into the realm of the heroic, but it's the two young stars—one a whirlwind and the other a quiet protector—who make this only-slightly tall tale into something towering.

The train tracks and power lines still run out here, but at least to the kids whom the system deems have no future, at the present such things are worth more broken and scrapped in piles on horse-drawn carts, while the rest of the world drives past. Barnard teases out those thematic parallels gently, with a nuance that allows us to contemplate such meaning without being overly didactic about the realities of life in this place.

Having chosen to pitch her stall this time directly on the royal road of British art cinema, Barnard nevertheless brings a distinctive poetic spin to her material, making the film as much a study of the porous boundary between town and country as Kes was. There's a strikingly eerie ruralist magic to the repeated shots of horses standing on horizons at night – Barnard and DP Mike Eley make strong, often stylised use of horizontals...

Barnard brought a surreal magic to the squalor of The Arbor, blending documentary interview with uncanny lip-sync performance, and while she reins in the formal friskiness here, she retains her feel for perverse splendour.

It is doubtful that Barnard's brand of social realism has evolved into an artistic tool of distanciation apropos her experimental work, but the exacting poetry of the film strikes such perfect blows as to frame it as another fairy tale to be read aloud to or, more precisely, projected at adults... In the absence of any apparent formal conceit, Barnard's parable is still raw enough to wound while its emotional impact could wring tears from metal.