Metacritic reviews

Without his usual tics, Malkovich is a wonder, quietly transforming an unassuming town fixture into Cut Bank's conscience. But the revelatory performance is Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) as Derby Milton.

This Bizarro-universe Coen brothers mash-up has the decency to be sporadically fun, even when it isn’t especially original or steady.

Watching an estimable quintet of character actors do their thing is the chief pleasure of Cut Bank.

If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.

Shakman cast this well, so well he can afford to waste a good actor like Oliver Platt on a tiny role as a careless, Bluetooth-addicted Fed and Thornton on a couple of simple exposition scenes.

If only anything felt at stake in this story's dark spiral.

It is up to its fine cast to build what little sense of mystery is conjured and to bring a sense of coherence to a narrative mishmash that is all smirking attitude with no subtext. Think of it as a goof.

Clever enough to provoke a few abrupt laughs along the way, this big screen debut for two television stalwarts, director Matt Shakman (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) and writer Robert Patino (Sons of Anarchy, Prime Suspect), is sabotaged by some frightfully on-the-nose expository dialogue and an adamantly prosaic visual style.

From the beginning, Cut Bank isn’t just tonally inconsistent, it doesn’t really have one. It’s flat. There’s no sense of rhythm, tension, or atmosphere.

It roars to a bitterly funny pitch every so often, but from the lack of life in the picture and such a stacked cast, you get the sense that the lunch breaks between filming resulted in more adventurous storytelling than the events that made it into the final cut.