50
Carlos Conceição’s Tommy Guns unfolds less as a cunning mashup of war-movie and horror-comedy tropes than as a flatfooted genre hybrid.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
58
The Film Stage by Ethan Vestby
The idea of a moralist ghost story to be read under the covers with a flashlight isn’t so bad, but it gets lost under so much art-film ostentation.
65
Conceição steps into the same precarious territory sometimes occupied by Pedro Costa and Miguel Gomes... proving his own sly, supple talent.
65
Sight & Sound by Jessica Kiang
Tommy Guns builds, strangely, sneakily, to a parable of despair at the (predominantly masculine) mass delusion that is war itself
60
New York Times by Natalia Winkelman
It’s a stylized spectacle, and the effects can feel discordant. Conceição eventually chips through the horror genre enamel to expose a message about the futility of war, but the tale’s miscellany of moods dulls its ultimate power.
60
Along the way there are occasional horror-movie touches, prefiguring an action-heavy Grand Guignol climax that provides a satisfying payoff to the picture’s interlocking enigmas.
70
Chicago Reader by Noah Berlatsky
Conceição has created a smart, strange film that is disjointed because colonialism is a thing of disjointed desires, histories, and deaths.