Wildcat

Wildcat will be a far richer experience for audiences already familiar with O’Connor’s work. For neophytes, there’s still much to enjoy, but the thematic resonance between story and storyteller gets a little lost.

With pinpoint production design, makeup and wardrobe capturing the 1950s time period, exquisite cinematography and brilliant work by talented actors who get to sink their teeth into some meaty roles, Wildcat is an inventive and haunting mood piece...

Hawke vividly depicts what one deduces from O’Connor’s brash, unrepentantly idiosyncratic work – the blurring of her imagination and reality.

I think [Flannery O'Connor] was a great writer, but unapproachable in some ways. I'd say that for the movie as well.

Brims with passion and integrity. I’m grateful that it exists.

In the hands of such passionate talents, “Wildcat” becomes a curious and purposeful project that goes beyond the guidelines of traditional 'biopics' to try to give life to O'Connor's most intimate thoughts. [Full review in Spanish]

There's enough cogency to its biopic throughlines that makes her story accessible and poignant, but there's a lot about the narrative structure here that poetically blurs the line between fiction and reality.

Like O’Connor’s writing, it can be both challenging and rewarding depending on a reader or viewer’s tolerance for this particular brand of storytelling.

While a lot does not work, Ethan Hawke's "Wildcat" is a daring effort to bring the eerie beauty of Flannery o'Connor's work to the screen.

here’s a spark in Maya Hawke’s performance that indicates the inner life as much as the bits of story, both from the page and her time. Wildcat often moves by heedless leaps, but it remains a meditative curiosity. Grace is sought, and sometimes found.