51
Metascore
12 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 67The PlaylistAnkit JhunjhunwalaThe PlaylistAnkit JhunjhunwalaWildcat should provide interest to audiences that have read and enjoyed O’Connor’s work and might even spur new readers to seek her stories out.
- 63Slant MagazineChris BarsantiSlant MagazineChris BarsantiBy shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.
- 60Total FilmMatt MaytumTotal FilmMatt MaytumUltimately, though, the combination of handsome visuals and assemblage of sketchy moments leave it feeling more like a museum piece, offering impressions over a gratifying narrative experience.
- 58IndieWireSiddhant AdlakhaIndieWireSiddhant AdlakhaWildcat is too tame in its portrayal of suffering to let its Catholic undertones sing or take powerful cinematic form, resulting in a work where paradoxes are half-baked dilemmas that seem too conveniently solved, and life itself is something that happens far off-screen.
- 50ColliderNate RichardColliderNate RichardFor as much care and passion that the Hawkes put into Wildcat, the film never knows what it wants to be or even what audience it wants to be speaking to.
- 50VarietyPeter DebrugeVarietyPeter DebrugeIt’s emotionally exhausting, but audiences come away with a sense of her legacy, as well as an appreciation for the adversity she faced (and, to a lesser degree, a sense of the criticism that has been leveled against her).
- 40The GuardianCharles BramescoThe GuardianCharles BramescoEthan Hawke has good taste, and his past undertakings as director have affirmed that, but the biopic’s big built-in pitfall – the psychologically facile connect-the-dots between a figure’s life and works – swallows up his perceptible esteem for O’Connor.
- 40The New York TimesBrandon YuThe New York TimesBrandon YuHalf-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.
- 35Paste MagazineKatarina DocalovichPaste MagazineKatarina DocalovichRegrettably, a gross number of missteps overshadow the Hawkes’ good intentions with this film. Even without Maya Hawke’s frumpy hag drag as O’Connor, complete with too-large dentures and an unfortunate wig, the lack of creative risk taken by the filmmakers, as well as the lack of research done by the team, sinks Wildcat before it gets started.
- 16The Film StageEthan VestbyThe Film StageEthan VestbyOne hopes Wildcat can disappear into thin air so that it doesn’t have to weigh on Hawke’s legacy.