Lean on Pete

As the film takes deeper and darker turns, it also becomes something special, something unflinchingly honest, something that will punch you in the gut AND touch your heart.

Lean on Pete is a methodical and memorable film primarily because director Haight, adapting from Willy Vlautin’s novel, keeps a distance from his characters, never taking the easy route, and never, ever letting the movie enter the killing fields of the corny or cliched.

I was afraid at first that I would be watching a sobfest. I needn’t have worried. Nothing very grand is being attempted here, but there’s a core of feeling to what we are witnessing that keeps the sentimentality in check.

It’s a road movie in which the origin is more interesting than the finish line, but Lean on Pete is never less than fully felt.

Lean on Pete is at its potent, stirring best during the opening furlough, when it focuses on this makeshift hobo family as it criss-crosses the Pacific Northwest from one racetrack to the next.

Lean on Pete is certainly not a film without qualities (credit to the supporting cast and Magnus Nordenhof Jønck’s cinematography in particular), but viewers might just feel the gnawing sense of a director losing his grip on the reins.

Sadly, the intriguing set up - along with Del and Bonnie - is left behind for a too nakedly state-of-America musing, with everyone Charley happens across having some social ill to portray.

unpredictable, sensitive, heartbreaking and beautiful! Charlie Plummer is the right person for the lead. and Andrew Haigh is definitely do the great job... again!

Just a wonderful movie! As many reviewers have noted, a bravura performance by Charlie Plummer, and really the whole cast is superb. Steve Buscemi is always great, Chloe Sevigny is completely believable as a shady jockey, and it's great to see Alison Elliott again in a most moving role. I can't believe it's been 20 years since I saw her wonderful performance in "Spitfire Grill". I surely am getting old.

Decent enough, but not a patch on Haigh's previous work 15-year-old Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer) lives with his father, Ray (Travis Fimmel), who is drinking himself into an early grave. Finding work caring for an ageing race horse named Lean on Pete, Charley is devastated when he learns that Pete's owner, Del Montgomery (Steve Buscemi), is planning to slaughter the animal. Determined to save his friend, Charley steals Pete, and the two set out on an odyssey across the modern American frontier. Fans of writer/director Andrew Haigh will know his unassailable talent for what one might label unsentimental emotionalism; his films deal with intensely emotional situations without lapsing into Speilbergian fawnishness. And, although compared to the excellent Weekend (2011), and the masterful 45 Years (2015), Lean on Pete is a touch melodramatic, Haigh's talent for allowing character and theme to rise organically to the surface through quiet moments of introspection is still very much to the fore. So why not a higher score? Adapted from Willy Vlautin's 2010 novel of the same name, the biggest problem with the film is that things are laid on too thick; Charley is very much a Job figure, and suffers such a litany of misfortunes that one fully expects him to be diagnosed with terminal cancer. Similarly, the pseudo-allegorical nature of the characters he encounters is too on-the-nose for the realistic milieu Haigh has crafted. Part state-of-the-nation address, part bildungsroman, it's worth a look, but is ultimately lacking a satisfying thematic through-line.

Aburrida, contemplativa, lo mejor es cuanod matan al papa, y cuando matan al caballo

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]