Sicario
Lionsgate | Release Date: September 18, 2015 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
82
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 48 Critic Reviews
Positive:
44
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
ConsequenceMichael RoffmanNov 9, 2016
Sicario works on every level. It’s also fairly prescient, coming at a time when America rages on about the ethics of border control and the mounting war on drugs. Read full review
100
Total FilmMatt GlasbyOct 5, 2015
Pulled from the news but punched up to fever pitch, Sicario represents the perfect mix of cerebral and visceral thrills. Star, director and screenwriter all bring their A-game. Read full review
100
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallSep 29, 2015
Sicario is a tentacled drug cartel thriller grabbing viewers by the throat and squeezing for two hours. This movie continually defies the conventions of its genre, from its hero's gender to the vagueness of its morality. Read full review
100
EmpireDan JolinSep 22, 2015
A beautifully murky, hard-edged thriller. Quite simply, one of the best films of the year. Read full review
100
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperSep 22, 2015
It’s an unusual mix of big-picture issues, grindhouse pulp and pure, rough entertainment, bolstered by one of the better ensemble casts of the year. This movie is not, um, fussing around. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloSep 16, 2015
It’s an uncommonly bold gambit, expressly designed to frustrate people who want to see a strong woman deliver a righteous ass kicking. The progressivism here is instead rooted in futility and despair, which provides much more of a valuable shock to the system. Read full review
100
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatySep 16, 2015
With a taut and timely screenplay by Taylor Sheridan, Sicario is a brilliant action thriller with the smarts of a message movie. Read full review
100
VarietyScott FoundasMay 23, 2015
The opening of Sicario unfolds at such an anxiety-inducing pitch that it seems impossible for Villeneuve to sustain it, let alone build on it, but somehow he manages to do just that. He’s a master of the kind of creeping tension that coils around the audience like a snake suffocating its prey. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyMay 23, 2015
The violence of the inter-American drug trade has served as the backdrop for any number of films for more than three decades, but few have been as powerful and superbly made as Sicario. Read full review
91
Portland OregonianJeff BakerOct 6, 2015
The violence is shocking, effective and soaked into the dry brown landscape. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesMark OlsenSep 19, 2015
By turns thrilling, disorienting and draining, Sicario exists in a border zone seemingly of its own devising between the art film and the action movie. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinSep 18, 2015
What keeps Sicario from cynicism is the nature and depth of Villeneuve’s gaze, not childishly wide-eyed but capable still of feeling pain. He’s a terrific director. You know that if his heroine, Alice, gets out of Cartel-land alive, she might spend a few months in an asylum, but she’ll be back, hell-bent on seizing the foreground. Read full review
90
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganMay 23, 2015
Sicario is an ambush, a low-slung film about a dirty drugs war with Mexico which challenges and engages in equal measure. It moves with grim tenacity, confounding expectations until its very final sequence. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonNov 9, 2016
Far from being just another crime story, Sicario is cinema at its most ambitious. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 9, 2016
Sicario is a conventionally unconventional drug wars thriller, a well-cast, breathlessly executed peek into the heart of a Trumpian nightmare of Mexican cartels which kill at will on either side of an embattled border. Read full review
88
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldNov 9, 2016
So much of Sicario, Denis Villeneuve’s disturbing drama set in the world of law enforcement and Mexican drug cartels (the title is the Mexican term for a hit man), takes place on Emily Blunt’s face. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliOct 5, 2015
Those who go to a Villeneuve production, Sicario included, must be prepared for intense suspense, moral ambiguity, and an ending that doesn't conform to Hollywood norms. Read full review
88
Miami HeraldRene RodriguezOct 1, 2015
The sound never loses its urgency, its sense of immediate danger, straight through to the closing shot of the film. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzSep 29, 2015
Villeneuve (Prisoners, Incendies) once again proves he can craft a gripping tale that never collapses under its own moral weight. Sicario is not an easy film to watch, but it is a riveting and essential one. Read full review
88
New York PostKyle SmithSep 17, 2015
Sicario, which combines dizzying action scenes with a taut script, ravishing photography and an otherwordly musical score, is a knockout. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversSep 17, 2015
In Spanish, "sicario" means "hitman." In film terms, Sicario is sensational, the most gripping and tension-packed spin through America's covert War on Drugs since Steven Soderbergh's Traffic 15 years ago. Read full review
85
TheWrapAlonso DuraldeSep 17, 2015
Sicario calls to mind the films of the 1970s — not necessarily the ones we think of as capital-I Important, but the seamy, sweaty thrillers that subtly slipped in anti-establishmentarian messages amid the violence. It mixes arthouse and grindhouse into a most satisfying cocktail. Read full review
83
HitfixGregory EllwoodMay 23, 2015
Sicario starts and ends with Blunt’s impassioned performance (and she's spectacular in her final scene), but it’s Del Toro who is the real standout. Read full review
80
ScreenCrushMatt SingerNov 9, 2016
Even at its most comprehensible, there’s a lot Sicario deliberately leaves unsaid, and it builds to a crescendo of mayhem and moral rot worthy of a great film noir. Read full review
80
We Got This CoveredSam WoolfNov 9, 2016
The acting, craft, and tone of Sicario are so precise that the absurdity of this cartel yarn is both its greatest weakness, and maybe its entire point. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzSep 24, 2015
There are no winners here. Maybe that’s cynical, or maybe it’s true. But it’s a bleak and sometimes powerful message that Villeneuve delivers with blunt force. Read full review
80
SlateDana StevensSep 19, 2015
Rather than a birds’-eye procedural about a complex international mission, it’s a close-up of that mission from the point of view of the participant who understands it the least. Read full review
80
New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierSep 17, 2015
This dramatic thriller finds a spot somewhere between your brain and your stomach, and drills in. Read full review
80
SalonAndrew O'HehirSep 17, 2015
Sicario is a queasy-making thrill ride through Dick Cheney’s Theme Park on the Dark Side, with an enjoyable cast headed by Blunt, Josh Brolin as a bro-tastic but oddly sinister secret agent in flip-flops and Benicio Del Toro as a person of uncertain provenance (is he Mexican? Is he Colombian? Is he CIA?) who is approximately the scariest guy ever. Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony LaneSep 14, 2015
If Sicario does not collapse under its own grimness, that is because of the pulse: the care with which Villeneuve keeps the story beating, like a drum, as he steadies himself for the next set piece. Read full review
80
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 23, 2015
Each set piece is orchestrated with aplomb - a raid on a tunnel under the border being a particular stand out - but Sicario is kept grounded in reality. Villeneuve keeps his focus tight on his small group of characters and though the plot is complex, it fits the Byzantine intricacies of the problem and the obscure motivations of the operators. Read full review
80
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 23, 2015
Blunt’s performance has an edge of steel. She brings off a mix of confidence, bewilderment and vulnerability, which functions very well against the alpha male characters higher up the chain of command. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenSep 30, 2015
Sicario is at its best when its borderlines are fluid and indistinct. Read full review
75
The Film StageGiovanni Marchini CamiaNov 9, 2016
It delivers a constant, exhilarating stream of elaborate and exquisitely photographed thrills that ends up largely compensating for the would-be profundity. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaOct 6, 2015
I'm not sure if leavening is the right word, but Brolin, as an enigmatic U.S. agent with a world-weary cynicism and a black-ops vibe, provides at least a dose of (very) dark humor to the proceedings. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleSep 24, 2015
If at any point in Sicario, you feel lost, don’t worry about it. The movie is all about being lost and, in any case, all becomes clear, eventually. Read full review
75
Washington PostStephanie MerrySep 24, 2015
Every scene of calm, potentially, is trip-wired for an explosion. But for all its chilling tension and horrific imagery, Sicario is also a beautiful movie. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsSep 24, 2015
Sicario doesn't fall apart in its second half, exactly, but it does settle for less than it should. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoSep 15, 2015
At times, Sicario is a deeply satisfying, intense examination of a war with no rules of engagement, driven by a spectacular performance by Benicio Del Toro and typically mesmerizing cinematography from Roger Deakins. At other times, especially in its middle act, Sicario can be frustratingly self-indulgent. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineEd GonzalezSep 13, 2015
Denis Villeneuve's film views life in the age of the modern-day drug war as an ever-crescendoing existential nightmare. Read full review
75
The PlaylistJessica KiangMay 23, 2015
Amazing to look at, amazing to listen to, yet just a bit underwhelming to really think about, Sicario Denis Villeneuve's Mexican drug cartel drama is superlatively strong in every conceivable way except story. Read full review
67
IndieWireEric KohnMay 23, 2015
Though Villeneuve magnifies the pervasive dread surrounding the modern drug war, he's better at conveying the thrill of creeping through that battlefield than the complex set of interests sustaining it. Read full review
63
Charlotte ObserverLawrence ToppmanOct 2, 2015
Making a film with fine performances, adept direction, first-rate photography and a doltish screenplay is like starting a rock band with no drummer. The result may yield satisfying, even memorable moments. But every time you try to build momentum, the project falls apart. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy BurrOct 2, 2015
The dark nihilism of Sicario masks a reliance on easier solutions, ones we’ve been fed by decades of genre films and that feed our need for justice dispensed with violent, vengeful directness. The movie promises to clear the fetid air around the drug wars. In the end it’s just another drug. Read full review
60
Time Out LondonGuy LodgeOct 5, 2015
Sicario occasionally seems a little too impressed by its own nihilism. Still, this is an involving, grown-up film from a director whose muscular technique continues to impress: one might call it pulp in the same manner one would a plate of minced meat. Read full review
60
The New York TimesA.O. ScottSep 17, 2015
Mr. Villeneuve, aided by Taylor Sheridan’s lean script, Roger Deakins’s parched cinematography and Johann Johannsson’s slow-moving heart attack of a score, respects the imperatives of genre while trying to avoid the usual clichés. It’s not easy, and he doesn’t entirely succeed. Read full review
60
Village VoiceAmy NicholsonSep 15, 2015
Villeneuve's proven he's got a strong punch. The trouble is, he barely aims. Read full review
60
The TelegraphTim RobeyMay 23, 2015
There’s not much fault to find with Sicario on the level of craft or performances, just its rather sputtering momentum, and the lack of a higher purpose. Read full review
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