Stunning cinematography. A story which portrays some of the painful history of our country. Some great gnarly old faces in this film.

A slow burner version of an old Western, with a gripping - and confronting - take on black-white relations in Australia. The style is not standard Aussie movie making, and nor is the use of relatively flat light where normally we get constant 'golden hour'. It's all the better for all that. The antithesis of Luhrmann's 'Australia' in that sense.

Best Australian film in decades. Just go see it.

I went in to Sweet Country completely blind, had no idea what it was about, knew literally nothing beyond Sam Neill being in it, and the fact that it was called "Sweet Country" (good thing too, 'cause the trailer I watched for it a week later spoils literally the most important and final plot point). Sweet Country is a slow-burn venture in the right way, that makes some odd stylistic choices which perhaps would have better served a different sort of movie. A distinctive film for a year that has had a lot of same-same movies.

absolutely incredible film in which every second has had hours of though put into it. Warwick Thornton was very aware in what he was trying to achieve, and succeeded incredibly.

Beautifully shot, intensely told and very moving story.

Some excellent scenes of outback Australia bring revival to a thin plot and slow pace. Lack of depth in character development, especially the interplay between Sam and his pursuer, begs more questions than providing answers in the plot.

This is one of a long line of Australian films about that country's Indigenous history that are documentary, not only a fictionalised story. Indigenous people made this film and the Indigenous actors here, while their film acting is superbly fluid and transparent, are not just acting. The history of their people is alive in them, as if the voices of the past are speaking now. That is a testament to the Indigenous survival. The influence of Indigenous people on today's Australian culture is such that the white actors' performances ring true with thorough understanding, and the cinema was full of non-Indigenous Australians. The film has the mark of inevitability - everyone is expecting to see these atrocities that happened in the everyday, during the taking of the Australian land mass. For Indigenous people, survival meant living through slavery, crime and betrayal. The predictability of this story underlines artistically what lies in the DNA of the country. Today, many Indigenous people live in third world conditions; nearly all child prisoners in jails are Indigenous. So the film is not surprising, and the audience did not go to see it for that. There is a desire to hear the Indigenous story told by the people themselves. Plus, the Indigenous style of telling is possessed of a great quick wit, a sure dart of communication, that gets you before you know it's coming. This story is told simply, with strong production values. The landscape and the dwellings are unremittingly harsh, with one exception - the stock horses looked like show specimens. Why not get the horses instead from among the thousands in the dogger sales, and give them a future? Otherwise, the film's value lies in its reality and lack of sensationalism: it's not about thrills, but the grind. In the age of gratuitous cinema violence, in contrast there is nothing extraneous here, though there is violence aplenty. Thinking of an outback tour? Make this film a part of your homework.

Gut wrenching, raw, poetic and true

A movie of visuals first and foremost.

While Sweet Country snakes along to an inevitable outcome, Thornton retains a sharp control over the movie's ravishing visuals, assembling them with a rhythmic quality that transcends any specific time and place.

It's a movie that you really have to brace yourself to watch because though it is an amazing film, the subject matter isn't pretty.

A bleak story presented with great style, it's a finely made Australian western that demonstrates the malleability of that most American of genres as well as the impressive gifts of Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton.

In a milieu where, the dialogue repeatedly suggests, madness has become the defining condition of the white colonizer, the dispassionate unforgiving beauty of these landscapes-of a country that's often far from sweet-comes to embody its own bleak sanity.

Around this spare story...director Warwick Thornton constructs a searing indictment of frontier racism as remarkable for its sonic restraint as its visual expansiveness.