Cannes 2017 winner The Square: Reviews roundup

Ruben Östlund dark comedy The Square won the French festival most coveted award, the Palme d’Or. Let’s take a look at how the othe publications thought about this film that conquered Cannes 2017.

The Guardian: Peter Bradshaw – 4 stars

“The ape/dinner sequence really is a cold-sweat-inducing theatre of cruelty and fear: a Stanford Experiment in accepting public humiliation. Östlund may have been inspired by Roy Andersson or maybe Lars Von Trier. There is a drop of Buñuel there too – but Östlund’s own signature is plain. This is high wire cinema.”

The Telegraph: Robbie Collin – 4 stars

“The Square is a sleek, scalding rejoinder to Christian’s PR team, who believe cutting through the noise of modern life requires a short, sharp shock. Slow burn – and at almost two and a half hours, the burn here is positively languid – has a culminative force that can’t be resisted.”

Financial Times: Raphael Abraham – 4 stars

“At times the film feels overly episodic and pleased with itself but this is a sharp and skilful dissection of bourgeois hypocrisies that resonates all too uncomfortably.”

Variety: Owen Gleiberman

“Ostlund, at his best, is a heady and enthralling filmmaker, but unfortunately, he has so much on his mind that he is also, at his weakest, a shapeless and didactic one. The Square is more outrageous but less effective than Force Majeure. It’s two hours and 22 minutes long, and though it has a strong first half, the more it goes on the less it hangs together. Ostlund […] needs to let his instinct for suspense, which ignites individual scenes, guide the shape of an entire movie. But when he does, he’ll deliver a knockout. Because he possesses the thing in filmmaking that counts most: a voice.”

Screen Daily: Lee Marshall

“The Square is at its best doing just two of the many things it essays. The first is to use a municipal contemporary art museum […] to probe in comic but also serious ways how we engage with culture, power, and each other. The second is to chart the undoing of a cocky, polished aesthete turned businessman and politician, whose downward trajectory begins when he tries to let his alpha male side out of its cage. But in all its flawed brilliance, The Square remains an original, visceral, uncomfortable and essential viewing experience.”

Hollywood Reporter: Todd McCarthy

“Swedish writer-director Ruben Ostlund takes modern society’s temperature and finds it dangerously overheated in the madly ambitious and frequently disquieting The Square. Following his unnerving 2014 international hit Force Majeure with a work that addresses some of the world’s pressing ills with very dark and queasy comedy, Ostlund juggles quite a few balls here, arguably a few too many to keep them all airborne for nearly two-and-a-half hours.”

Cine-Vue: John Bleasdale – 3 stars

“There is much to enjoy here – especially at the beginning – and Östlund’s ambition and vision are to be applauded. However, The Square would have been greatly improved had the director taken his scalpel and his demanding critical eye and applied it to the film itself.”

Indie Wire: Eric Kohn – C+

“The Square has too many masterful moments in search of a good movie. It’s further evidence that the Swedish director has a wonderful eye for deadpan comedy that can pitch into despair at any moment, but Ostlund’s story veers off in so many directions that it’s almost like he can’t decide if any of them are worth the trip.”

Watch three clips from The Square here: