Reviews Counted: 7
Positive: 0
100% Mixed: 7
Negative: 0
average reviews: 44%
Rating: 2 out of 5 (Okay)
Ratings:— Review By: ROSS BONAIME Site: collider.com
It’s also just a shame that Finestkind doesn’t prioritize the brother bonding between Charlie and Tom, as that attempts to be the heart and soul of the film, but gets completely lost along the way. Watching this crew get to know each other, Read full review.
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (Good)
Ratings:— Review By: Michael Rechtshaffen Site: The Hollywood Reporter
There’s a stagnating whiff of familiarity hanging over Finestkind, Brian Helgeland‘s personally-informed portrait of a splintered family of fishermen struggling to reconnect with each other over choppy New Bedford, Massachusetts, waters.
Although anchored by a number of strong performances, particularly those of Ben Foster and fresh-faced Toby Wallace as estranged half-brothers attempting to find common ground despite their different upbringings, Helgeland’s meandering film still feels stuck. Read full review
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (Good)
Ratings:— Review By: Jared Mobarak Site: The Film Stage
We’ve got dadcore porn here. If you’re a father and you’ve ever wondered if you led your son astray, you could live vicariously through Ray Eldridge (Tommy Lee Jones) and Dennis Sykes (Tim Daly) and know you can always come through at the eleventh hour. Because even though the motto at the heart of Brian Helgeland’s Finestkind is that the time between birth and death is what truly matters, the film reminds us you can actually right all your wrongs from that in-between with a final expression of love. Apology, hug, pile of cash, bullet, or all the above. Read full review
Rating: 2 out of 5 (Bad)
Ratings:— Review By: Rodrigo Perez Site: The Playlist
“Finestkind,” the new drama from “L.A. Confidential” and “Mystic River” screenwriter and “42” director Brian Helgeland, is not a great movie, but some of it is fascinating, even when it doesn’t work. Easy to dismiss because some of its broad, ridiculous, and suspension-of-disbelief turns—it’s essentially about a New England fishing community band of brothers that turn to drug dealers and spiraling criminal consequences in order to get out of the illegal activities jam they’re already in—the plot is fairly uninspired and breaks suspension of disbelief early. But the story, which arguably doesn’t work entirely either— about the issues between fathers and sons, the emotional complexities of family and the legacies of dysfunctional past family traumas, and how we struggle to forgive, accept, and move on—is filled with an emotional texture that’s well-intentioned, occasionally resonant, and sometimes even features something resembling heart and soul. Read full review
Rating: 2 out of 5 (Bad)
Ratings:— Review By: Robert Daniels Site: IndieWire
I don’t know where to start on “Finestkind,” the saccharine, incomprehensible northeastern America fishing family drama from writer-director Brian Helgeland. As I watched this turgid muddle, a messy ball of nonsensical threads and worse performances, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Roger Ebert’s old maxim: No good film is too long, and no bad film is too short. Read full review
Rating: 2.0 out of 5 (Bad)
Ratings:— Review By: Ross Bonaime Site: Collider
Early on in Finestkind, the aspiring fisherman Charlie (Toby Wallace) asks why the other guys on the crew keep saying the word “finestkind.” Its usage seems indeterminable, as it keeps getting used in different contexts, making it hard to nail down, and even the boat owned by Tommy Lee Jones’ Ray, we will come to learn, is named “Finestkind.” We’re told that the word. Read full review
Rating: 3.0 out of 5 (Good)
Ratings:— Review By: Peter Debruge Site: Variety
“Finestkind,” the name of both Brian Helgeland’s new film and the high-line fishing boat Tommy Lee Jones captains within it, is one of those words that New Englanders find hard to define, but seem to have no trouble using in a sentence. It means quality — of fish, of people, of principles — and it sets the bar for the shaggy family portrait Helgeland crafts around two half-brothers wrestling with their place in the blue-collar New Bedford community. Read full review
Rating: 2.5 out of 5 (Good)
Ratings:— Review By: Nell Minow Site: RogerEbert.com
Like its main characters, this movie is at its best on the sea. This film’s location, the fishing community of New Bedford, Massachusetts, is where writer/director Brian Helgeland, grew up, and like its characters, he worked on a boat that collected deep sea scallops over 100 miles offshore for two weeks at a time. Read full review
Devotion Movie Details & Credits
Two brothers from opposite sides of the tracks are reunited as adults. Desperate circumstances force them into a deal with an organized crime syndicate in Boston, and a young woman gets caught in the middle.
Initial release: September 8, 2023
Director: Brian Helgeland
Distributed by: Paramount+
Music by: Carter Burwell
Produced by: Gary Foster; Russ Krasnoff; Taylor Sheridan; David C. Glasser