The Butcher Boy: Critic Reviews

Anecdotal and increasingly chilling, The Butcher Boy moves from its early prankster spirit into parts unknown with the help of many pungent background touches.

I find myself in an embarrassing position: I think this is a great movie, but I'm not sure.

The movie held me outside; I didn't connect in the way I wanted to, and by the end I was out of sympathy with the material.

Director Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe adapted McCabe's novel for this bland 1998 shocker that fails miserably as satire, character study, and anything else it might have aspired to.

Neil Jordan's most accomplished and brilliant film to date, Butcher Boy is satisfying as faithful literary adaptation and inense cinematic experience that brings to mind in theme Kubrick's equally brilliant Cloakwork Orange.

Jordan's adaptation of The Butcher Boy (co-written with McCabe) remains a compelling exploration of the permeable border between normal childhood and full-on insanity.

The Butcher Boy works best as a dark comedy and social satire, and is somewhat less successful as a character study of a deeply-troubled young boy whose violent impulses are fed by his unstable environment.

Jordan is remarkable in his ability to reveal people's inner lives and the interaction between everyday life and an individual's imagination and driving passions.

Owens' remarkable, high-pitched performance and Jordan's lush, visionary style are perfectly suited to the material.

Intensely colourful, but somehow soulless.

A horrific tale of madness and abuse told with pop-eyed color and giddy humor.

Though the movie sometimes looks as if the authentic Irish wit, colour and blarney has been filtered through the sensibility of a Bunuel or Polanski, Jordan never allows the surreal/expressionist aspects to dominate.

The film almost immediately loses the major asset of the novel: its language. Possibly a quarter of the movie is incomprehensible to the American ear.

The film's horrific conclusion is as uncompromising as it is inevitable and, unfortunately, ever-more topical.

The Butcher Boy manages to present scenes of violence and despair within a carnival atmosphere, yet still touches us, largely due to Jordan's assured hand in directing this complex tale.

The Butcher Boy reveals how a soul's future, in the early stages of development, is highly influenced by love, or the lack of it.

What makes the film so disturbing is that it charts much of what happens in the normal course of growing up -- filtered through the main character's warped sense of reality.

So interesting, so compelling and so devastating, that the old idea is fresh and new again.

Absolutely frightening. Makes Dennis the Menace look like a little angel.

The Butcher Boy winds up to be a fairly lean and under-done cut of movie-making meat, but there's enough savory spicing to make the dish appealing.

A gripping portrait of an unforgettable character.

As disturbing as it is brilliant, The Butcher Boy reaffirms director Neil Jordan is most gifted when working with less money.