The story of English poet, writer and soldier Siegfried Sassoon.... (Full plot summary below)
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The story of English poet, writer and soldier Siegfried Sassoon.
Leave your thoughts about Benediction.
| ObserverRex ReedBeautifully designed and photographed, sensitively written and directed by England’s acclaimed Terence Davies, and impeccably acted by a distinguished cast that turns life into art, Benediction is one gorgeous motion picture. |
| SlashfilmBarry LevittBenediction" is true to its title, offering up a blessing — not to the Church, rather, but to those whose lives were never able to be lived to the fullest. The film is more than a beautifully performed, masterfully directed piece of entertainment. It transcends, offering hope to any person yearning for more. It is in equal turns lively, devastating, funny, hopeful, and heartbreaking. |
| Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangBenediction, Terence Davies’ achingly beautiful portrait of the English war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, is a movie of acute sadness and intense pleasure. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricable, which seems fitting, given how closely aesthetic bliss and moral despair were entwined in Sassoon’s own art. |
| San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleBenediction is an awesome combination of wildness and control. Davies is out there all by himself, speaking a cinematic language that is his own and that has little to do with plays or literature. |
| Little White LiesAdam WoodwardOwen wrote several other poems about the horrors of war before his untimely death in 1920, and there is one which Davies does not feature here whose title nonetheless captures the mournful spirit of his film. It’s called ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. |
| Slant MagazineKeith UhlichTerence Davies’s film is a rhapsodic portrayal of an upper-crust milieu in which words are wielded like weapons by people who might otherwise be pariahs. |
| The A.V. ClubJordan HoffmanThere’s nothing about this film that is uplifting, but Davies’ handling of the material is so exquisite that the overbearing melancholy becomes, in the end, a work of poetry. |
| The New YorkerRichard BrodyThe film brings the past to life with a vividness and an immediacy that seem wrenched from Davies’s very soul. |
| TheWrapAlonso DuraldeThe act of writing has tended to be flagrantly non-cinematic, but with these last two films, Davies proves that the internal life of the mind can indeed be explored and portrayed in a visual medium. With every scene a stanza, Benediction is a lyrical triumph. |
| RogerEbert.comOdie HendersonBenediction bears the distinctive stamp of its writer/director, Terence Davies, a man whose films feel more like poetic meditations on moods, emotions, and events than straightforward narratives. It’s as if we are floating above the material, touching down in different places at the filmmaker’s discretion. |
