Cillian Murphy stars in this relentlessly glum but powerful personal project, a soulful literary psychodrama about mercy, complicity and Church crimes in 1980s Ireland.

Full Review | Mar 10, 2024

Small Things Like These is a film about the cold and how difficult and even miraculous it is to escape poverty, in 1985 Ireland. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Mar 6, 2024

It stays true to the quietly devastating source material. Over a terse 97 minutes and a handful of simple scenes with bare-bones dialogue, the story of Bill Furlong is shown, not told.

Full Review | Mar 2, 2024

The lack of deep exploration and shallow execution dilute the movie's potential impact and leave unresolved many of the important questions it raises. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Mar 1, 2024

The quiet register encourages our own reflections on the very moral concerns time and circumstance have made unavoidable in the present day each and every day.

Full Review | Feb 27, 2024

I do wish the film would have more of a distinctive style or be more adventurous narratively, but ultimately the performances provide it with the human touch essential for such a human story.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2024

The difficult moments that puncture Bill’s daily life are propped up on a skeleton frame of close-ups on the (always-effective) harrowed eyes of Murphy, but it’s not enough to fill in the emotional blanks.

Full Review | Feb 25, 2024

Without any dramatic tension to carry us along, we’re all just stuck knee-deep in the bog, trudging through the terrible facts of recent history.

Full Review | Feb 19, 2024

This is a fantasy for modern audiences about how they might have behaved when the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland were an open secret best not discussed... documentaries, such as “Nothing Compares” or “Pray for Our Sinners,” have done a more accurate job.

Full Review | Feb 18, 2024

There are no easy answers here, and no tidy resolution; instead, it leaves the audience grappling with unresolved questions about individual responsibility, societal pressures, and the long-lasting wounds inflicted by systemic abuse.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Feb 18, 2024

Mielants is able to portray this restrained and dark screenplay by Walsh with nuance and without exploitation. It feels intimate and forces the audience to confront their own complicity in the prevalent evil surrounding them.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Feb 17, 2024

The moral schema of the film ends up having all the clarity of melodrama, with our suffering hero cast against a practically snarling villain that almost defies reality.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 17, 2024

Tim Mielants’ film is a haunting and meditative work, whose solemn rhythms mark a tantalizing first hour.

Full Review | Feb 16, 2024

Murphy again leads with aplomb and his casting alone will likely bring a bigger audience to this intelligent adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novel of the same name

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2024

I was so rapt, so caught up in this film, that I wasn’t aware that it was going to be the ending until the screen faded to black. It is an absorbing, committed drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2024

Subtly, Murphy limns the emotional make-up of a life that combines success and domestic contentment on one hand with, on the other, everyday disappointment and unhealed childhood scars.

Full Review | Feb 16, 2024

Small Things Like These is a tight-lipped Irish drama even more suffused with sadness than the log-line implies, and shouldered with hypnotic grace by a very special Cillian Murphy in his first post-Oppenheimer role.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 16, 2024

t’s a profound performance by Murphy – perhaps even more so in fewer words than Oppenheimer – as Bill’s anger burns with tragic urgency.

Full Review | Feb 15, 2024

Hats off already to Berlin for bucking the long-established “opening night dud” tradition (all festivals are prone to it) and instead unveiling what might be one of the strongest titles in the entire line-up.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 15, 2024

A key strength of “Small Things Like These” lies in Walsh and Mielants’ intelligent translation of Keegan’s bare bones style to the screen.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 15, 2024