Nocturnal Animals “Another Winner” from Tom Ford, Rave Reviews Across the Board

Tom Ford looks to have another great one on his hands with Nocturnal Animals, believes Owen Gleiberman, who writes:

[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]“Nocturnal Animals,” which premiered today at the 73rd International Venice Film Festival, is a suspenseful and intoxicating movie — a thriller that isn’t scared to go hog-wild with violence, to dig into primal fear and rage, even as it’s constructed around a melancholy love story that circles back on itself in tricky and surprising ways. With Amy Adams as a posh, married, but deeply lonely Los Angeles gallery owner, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the novelist from her past who finds himself trapped in a nightmare, the movie has two splendid actors working at the top of their game, and more than enough refined dramatic excitement to draw awards-season audiences hungry for a movie that’s intelligent and sensual at the same time.[/quotes]

[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]At a glance, “Nocturnal Animals,” with its hot glare of sex and violence, seems like a totally different animal from “A Single Man,” which was a magic-hour L.A. period piece about a refined gay professor in the pre-liberation era. Yet there’s an organic link between them. The Colin Firth character in “A Single Man” may have been conservative and closeted, but he was rapturously romantic — and Ford, in one of the most daring moves in modern gay cinema, portrayed that very romanticism in ways that linked it to a more repressed era. He tapped into the richness of feelings that could only be expressed underground. “Nocturnal Animals,” too, is a movie by a born romantic — only now, the love he portrays is threatened by a scary and corrupt world.[/quotes]

And another five star review from Peter Bradshaw:

[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]There’s a double-shot of horror and Nabokovian despair in this outrageously gripping and absorbing meta mystery-thriller from director Tom Ford, adapted by him from the 1993 novel Tony and Susan by Austin Wright. It’s a movie with a double-stranded narrative – a story about a fictional story which runs alongside – and it pulls off the considerable trick of making you care about both equally, something I think The French Lieutenant’s Woman never truly managed. Clive James once wrote that talk about “levels of reality” never properly acknowledges that one of these levels is really real. That probably holds true. But in Nocturnal Animals, these levels are equally powerful, and have an intriguingly queasy and potent interrelation.

Ford has surely raised his game from his faintly wan and over-determined drama A Single Man from 2009. There is something much more uninhibited and even raucous about this picture, which combines melodrama with a kind of teasing sophistication.[/quotes]

Geoffrey Macnab writes:
[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]In visual terms, this is a tour de force from Ford and his cinematographer Seamus McGravey. They deal with the LA scenes in a dream-like way that is reminiscent of David Lynch’sMullholland Drive but the Texan scenes have the grit and violence you’d find in a Peckinpah film. Ford also elicits excellent performances both from his two leads and from the supporting cast. The redoubtable Michael Shannon brings gravitas and macabre humour to his role as Bobby Andres, a hard-bitten Texan detective investigating an appalling crime. There is a very striking cameo from Laura Linney as Susan’s mother, a domineering, racist, Republican-type in pearls and with immaculately coiffed hair. Susan loathes her but recognises with horror that she shares many of her traits.

Nocturnal Animals is extraordinarily deft in the way it combines romanticism and bleakness. It’s a film that easily could have slipped into extreme pretentiousness but it never puts a foot wrong.[/quotes]

Meanwhile, this Variety piece says some journalists had to think about it more before coming to a conclusion as to whether they liked it or not, saying that La La Land is the more “generally liked” on the whole.