Monster's Ball

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

As for myself, as Leticia rejoined Hank in the last shot of the movie, I was thinking about her as deeply and urgently as about any movie character I can remember.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

It's a film in which complex issues are boiled down to human essences, not so much simplified as dramatized in the very best way.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

Hank is but the latest of Thornton's strikingly taciturn characters in a whole string of movies, but for Berry, Leticia represents a big-screen breakthrough.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

The actors make it unique and unforgettable.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

The raw intimacy of some of the scenes -- whether they take place at a diner, in the death house or in the bedroom -- is breathtaking.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

The movie holds you in thrall from first frame to last. Hatred is hatred unslaked. So is racism, ugliness, love, lust and sorrow.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Profoundly hopeful and optimistic film.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Packs a dramatic wallop that makes it one of the year's best movies.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

This is as anti-Hollywood a film as I have seen in recent months, one which takes conventional plot ideas and uses them not to season a melodrama, but to enrich fully three-dimensional characters and create a forceful motion picture.

Time Richard Corliss

The cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story.

Variety Robert Koehler

Burning with a quiet intensity, Monster's Ball is bolstered by a poetic, intelligent sensibility not seen in an American film since Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line."

New Times (L.A.) Gregory Weinkauf

Well redeemed by its dank atmosphere and cracker-barrel performances.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

The kind of quiet, effective film that burrows under the viewer's skin and takes root before you've had a chance to realize that it's permeated your constitutional makeup.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

Hate, love, bigotry, empathy and chance are the uninvited guests at Monster's Ball.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker

For all its darkness and tragedy, Monster's Ball is a film that wants to be liked and Forster stumbles over his good intentions to win the audience over.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Its ethical and intellectual insights wane when the love story kicks in, weakening what might have been a much deeper movie. Still, its performances are wonderful to watch.

Baltimore Sun Chris Kaltenbach

The film has a lot of right in it, including an ending that's suitably uncertain, but fraught with possibilities.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

The kind of film that could easily be undone by its own high-minded ambitions and dissolve in a pall of uplift. But it stays the course and gives the season two of its notable performances.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Dark and beautifully directed melodrama about the strange intersection of racism and emotional need.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Halle Berry is something else as Leticia Musgrove, the widow of an inmate who's just been executed by Hank and his crew, and that something else is commandingly passionate.

Film Threat Michael Dequina

Berry delivers an extraordinary performance that will startle even her most faithful fans.

Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector

A black waitress and a white corrections officer in rural Georgia experience more misery in the first hour of this movie than some people do in a lifetime, and to its credit the drama doesn’t collapse under the weight.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

A traffic map of calls and responses, lessons and homework, wishes and fulfillment. All roads lead to acting-award nominations, but none lead to truth.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

A serious movie made by seriously talented people, and I never quite came 'round to it.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

The film's elliptical character development sometimes renders the actors' work opaque; restraint is an underpracticed virtue, but even it can be taken to excess.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

This movie hyperventilates with pessimism to the point of perversity.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Handled more delicately, Monster's Ball could have been a fine little movie about human beings' capacity for growth and change. As it is, it's less than half a fine movie. The great surprise is that its actors come through in the clutch.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Wastes a ton of potent material.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

In its exploitation of human misery, Monster's Ball doesn't just invite cynicism; it provokes hostility.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

An arty sleepwalk. Thornton has developed a style of acting that goes beyond minimal into the near nonexistent.

Slate David Edelstein

When a movie wrenches you with the deaths of children then leaves you with nothing to take home but your confusion, it can make you thirsty for the blood of directors.