Critic Reviews

• V.A. Musetto, New York Post

  The movie is harrowing and hard to forget. But just when you think there's no hope, Sauvaire throws in a tearful moment of redemption.

• Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice

  Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.

• Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

  Basically, talented French director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire has too much style on his hands. His film isn't as amorally grandiose as City of God. Nor does it achieve the hulking tragedy of Gomorrah.

• David Jenkins, Time Out

  The film sees war as a deadener of moral and physical inhibition, a paradoxical state where there are no winners or losers, just the living and the dead. Stunning.

• Justin Chang, Variety

  A fearsome plunge into the world of child soldiers in present-day West Africa.

• Manohla Dargis, New York Times

  Johnny Mad Dog is an assaultive fiction about Liberian child soldiers.

• Clay Cane, BET.com

  Educational, truthful and important.

• Joseph Jon Lanthier, Slant Magazine

  Director Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's deftly stylized camerawork reminds us at key intervals that what we're seeing is artifice, dramatization.

• Eric Monder, Film Journal International

  ...it's difficult to recommend Johnny Mad Dog, despite-and in some ways because of-the fact it is very good.

• Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com

  breathless, ferocious, and deeply unsettling

• Cosmo Landesman, Times [UK]

  What end does a harrowing and horrifying film like this serve? Understanding? Political awareness? I'm not sure. One thing is certain: you won't forget it in a hurry.

• Philip French, Observer [UK]

  A gut-wrenching, documentary-style look at a company of Kalashnikov-wielding kids.

• David Edwards, Daily Mirror [UK]

  Never letting up for a moment, you should go see - but prepare to be shocked.

• Rich Cline, Shadows on the Wall

  Harrowing, violent and deeply disturbing, this realistic drama about children fighting in Liberia's grisly civil war (1999-2003) is not only a strong story, but it has wide resonance as a look at young people living without limits.

• Kevin Maher, Times [UK]

  There is an odd whiff of post-colonial bongo-bongo about it - i.e. sit back, munch popcorn and watch the natives blow holes in each other.

• Peter Bradshaw, Guardian [UK]

  War is brutalising, infantilising, dehumanising, requiring the unquestioning submission to authority. All soldiers are child soldiers: that is the bitterly cynical nightmare that Sauvaire's film insists upon to the very end.

• , Daily Telegraph

  Imagine an African Lord of the Flies pulled off with the jittery expertise of The Hurt Locker, and you're only some of the way to grasping what's in store in Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog.

• Derek Malcolm, This is London

  The film has an immediate power no one could deny.

• , Daily Mail [UK]

  This small, uncompromising masterpiece stands out in especially stark but refreshing relief.

• Leo Robson, Financial Times

  The film is swift and gripping but rarely flashy or titillating; sympathetic to its anti-heroes without ever slighting their victims.

Read all 21 critic reviews