SHEPHERDS AND BUTCHERS follows a jaded lawyer, John Weber (Steve Coogan), who takes on a seemingly hopeless multiple murder case and uncovers scandalous shortcomings in South Africa's capital punishment system as he mounts a defense for a prison guard traumatized by the executions he took part in.... (Full plot summary below)
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SHEPHERDS AND BUTCHERS follows a jaded lawyer, John Weber (Steve Coogan), who takes on a seemingly hopeless multiple murder case and uncovers scandalous shortcomings in South Africa's capital punishment system as he mounts a defense for a prison guard traumatized by the executions he took part in.
Leave your thoughts about Shepherds and Butchers.
| Toronto StarBruce DeMaraThe performances are solid, including Coogan and especially Garion Dowds as the laconic and mournful defendant. Director Oliver Schmitz gives the film a measured pace, stoking tension as the courtroom drama unfolds. |
| Independent Online (South Africa)Theresa SmithWatching Shepherds and Butchers is a harrowing experience that would sway you if you don't already have any firm opinion about capital punishment. |
| Movie NationRoger MooreI found the picture moving in spite of its seeming unwillingness to wholly grapple with race and Coogan’s unwillingness to master the Afrikaner accent. He’s a gifted mimic, and Riseborough manages it. What gives? But what it does wrestle with is profound, and profoundly disturbing. |
| HeyUGuysStefan PapeMissed the potential to be more of an emotionally rich experience. |
| VarietyGuy LodgeDowds’ harrowed, haunted performance as a boy overwhelmed not just by the wolves to which he has been thrown, but the ones he claims have unconsciously emerged within him, gives the film its anxious emotional center. |
| Village VoiceCalum MarshWithout Shepherds is all sprawl, a loose mélange of talking heads and landscape b-roll. |
| What She SaidAnne BrodieCoogan, known as a comic actor, does solid dramatic work and Garion Dowds' accused is living in a palpable living hell. He knows no one can be a shepherd and a butcher and stay sane. |
| The GuardianHenry BarnesShepherds and Butchers doesn’t know which it is: the twisty legal drama that’s going to herd us through the issue or the ferocious expose, laying out the quotidian grimness of systemic death. It’s better at the latter. Even though much of the action is penned in the courtroom, the horror – and the interest – are played out in the past. |
| Screen DailyLee MarshallWhat stands out in relief from the film’s flat characters and pedestrian storytelling is its dramatic core: the killing machine that death row had become in South Africa by the end of the 1980s, with 164 executions taking place in Pretoria Central Prison in the year in which Shepherds And Butchers is set, 1987. |
| Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerThis well-intentioned if somewhat heavy-handed historical affair is anchored by Coogan’s solid lead turn, with support from Andrea Riseborough as a hard-hitting state prosecutor and promising newcomer Garion Dowds as an executioner who could wind up facing the gallows. |
