Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
Screening Dates:
Fri 20 September 6:15pm
Sun 22 September 5:00pm
Director: David Lowery
Starring: Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Rooney Mara
A hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize and won the U.S. Dramatic Cinematography Award, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints stars Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone, The Killer Inside Me), Rooney Mara (Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Side Effects) and Ben Foster (Kill Your Darlings, Rampart) in a powerful love story set against the backdrop of 1970′s Texas Hill Country.
Bob Muldoon (Affleck) and Ruth Guthrie (Mara), an impassioned young outlaw couple on an extended crime spree, are finally apprehended by lawmen after a shootout in the Texas hills. Although Ruth wounds a local officer, Bob takes the blame. But four years later, Bob escapes from prison and sets out to find Ruth and their daughter, born during his incarceration. David Lowery paints a poetic, timeless picture, epic yet intimate, evoking the mythology of westerns and saturating the dramatic space with an aching sense of loss. Featuring gorgeous photography and powerful performances by Affleck, Mara as well as Ben Foster and Keith Carradine, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is a story of love, motherhood and searching for peace while faced with an unrelenting past.
Selected for Cannes Critics Week 2013, this is the critically acclaimed second feature from award-winning writer-director David Lowery.
***** “THE FILM IS SO SINGULAR, IT’S HARD TO PLACE. AT TIMES, ITS ELEGIAC VISUAL QUALITY EVOKES TERRENCE MALICK, BUT LOWERY’S SCRIPTING IS TIGHTER AND MORE ACCESSIBLE. HIS IS TRULY A FRESH VOICE, EXHILARATING TO HEAR” The Guardian
Critic: Cath Clarke
Date: 2013-09-04
Publication: Time Out
Quote: A slow, banjo-string-tight thriller ... Bodies gets under your skin and stays there.
Critic: Joe Williams
Date: 2013-08-29
Publication: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Quote: This Sundance-sanctioned, love-on-the-run melodrama is indie filmmaking of a deliberately timeless sort.
Critic: Ben Sachs
Date: 2013-08-29
Publication: Chicago Reader
Quote: Writer-director David Lowery strains for poetry at every turn, and only the strain registers.
Critic: Rene Rodriguez
Date: 2013-08-29
Publication: Miami Herald
Quote: Lowery has a lyrical style of storytelling that is delicate and subtle yet suffused with emotion and atmosphere. It's gentle and pointed at the same time.
Critic: Michael Phillips
Date: 2013-08-29
Publication: Chicago Tribune
Quote: It is not a large film. But Lowery may well be a large talent, and he sure knows how to cast the right actors.
Critic: Peter Rainer
Date: 2013-08-23
Publication: Christian Science Monitor
Quote: Lowery has a way with actors, though. As a local sheriff with an eye for Ruth, Ben Foster is excellent and, in a too-small role as a grizzled shopkeeper, Keith Carradine proves himself yet again to be one of our finest performers.
Critic: Steven Rea
Date: 2013-08-23
Publication: Philadelphia Inquirer
Quote: A loping and lovely romance, steeped in tragedy, with a Texas twang.
Critic: Mick LaSalle
Date: 2013-08-22
Publication: San Francisco Chronicle
Quote: The tone never changes. Scenes aren't inflected, and when the end comes, it registers, but without much impact.
Critic: Chris Vognar
Date: 2013-08-22
Publication: Dallas Morning News
Quote: On its own terms, Saints conjures a mood of stoic obsession at the service of a tale older than the Hill Country dirt it calls home.
Critic: John Anderson
Date: 2013-08-22
Publication: Newsday
Quote: A repository of fugitive Americana that's substantial and satisfying.
Critic: Kristin Tillotson
Date: 2013-08-22
Publication: Minneapolis Star Tribune
Quote: It feels raw, and real, and sets a tone that is sustained throughout.
Critic: Ty Burr
Date: 2013-08-22
Publication: Boston Globe
Quote: The characters are too ordinary to care deeply for and the story doesn't add up to much, but Lowery has made a shrine to his actors, to the land through which they move, and to the kind of cinema that once sustained us.
Critic: Bill Goodykoontz
Date: 2013-08-22
Publication: Arizona Republic
Quote: A slow-moving story of devotion, obsession and Texas justice.
Critic: Richard Brody
Date: 2013-08-19
Publication: New Yorker
Quote: The feel of the movie is intimate and handmade, as if Lowery were renewing, lovingly and poignantly, the landscape's ruined landmarks and infusing them with his own memories and dreams.
Critic: Alonso Duralde
Date: 2013-08-16
Publication: The Wrap
Quote: It's a gorgeous film to behold, but writer-director David Lowery gets so wrapped up in the visuals that the storytelling lags at critical moments.
Critic: David Thomson
Date: 2013-08-16
Publication: The New Republic
Quote: This is a hell of a film, a marvelous experience, far more beautiful than sentimental, so long as you don't have to have a mind made up for you.
Critic: Christy Lemire
Date: 2013-08-16
Publication: RogerEbert.com
Quote: A muted but always engrossing tale of young, doomed love.
Critic: Kyle Smith
Date: 2013-08-16
Publication: New York Post
Quote: Lowery put 90 percent of his energy into the atmosphere and 10 percent into the script.
Critic: Stephen Whitty
Date: 2013-08-16
Publication: Newark Star-Ledger
Quote: The places feel lived in. The story feels like life.
Critic: Andrew O'Hehir
Date: 2013-08-15
Publication: Salon.com
Quote: It marks the arrival of an immense talent who will be new to most moviegoers - although Lowery is a well-known figure in the indie-film world - and it's surely one of the best American films of the year.
