Click here to copy URL

Straw Dogs

2011

Rod Lurie

James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård, Dominic Purcell ...

5.4

5,225

Thriller. Drama Hollywood screenwriter David Sumner (James Marsden) and his actress wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) return to her small hometown in the deep South to prepare the family home for sale after her father's death. Once there, tensions build in their marriage and old conflicts re-emerge with the locals, including Amy's ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), leading to a violent confrontation.

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert Chicago Sun-Times	"Visceral, disturbing and well-made (...) Rod Lurie, the director of this version, cannot be accused of having softened the material (...) Rating: ★★★½ (out of four)"	POS
United States	Todd McCarthy The Hollywood Reporter	"Whereas Peckinpah managed not only to raise hackles but to get under the skin, Lurie manages only the former, which reduces the material to the level of sensation-mongering"	POS
United States	Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly	The original "Straw Dogs," at least to me, isn't close to being one of Peckinpah's masterpieces, but it's a movie that the people who first saw it still remember 40 years later. I doubt that anyone will remember the new one by next month.	NEU
United States	A. O. Scott The New York Times	"Mr. Lurie's movie does not quite succeed on its own, though it is pulpy and brutal and at times grotesquely comical. The story does not cohere, and the performances are uneven"	NEG
United States	Scott Bowles USA Today	"For a while, Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs not only matches the original but improves on the story with some deft contemporary flourishes (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of four)"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.