92% Take Shelter

All Critics (141) | Top Critics (29) | Fresh (130) | Rotten (11)

Shannon wonderfully modulates Nichols' portrait of a man whose mind and life seem to unravel before our eyes.

There's a strong, unsettling sense of disease that runs through Take Shelter, the best drama of the year so far.

Shannon is astounding, playing a good man pushed to the brink of sanity, maybe beyond. He portrays a sense of quiet desperation -- a feeling recognizable to many.

A work of hushed and persuasive emotional veracity.

The movies have long been mad about the onset of madness.

The chilling genius of "Take Shelter'' isn't that the threat is never specified but that it doesn't need to be.

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A film that's easier to admire (at least in part) than actually like, but it's also a difficult film to ignore.

The dread in this slow simmer of a film comes not from a clearly definable sense of danger, but more from a sense of simply not knowing.

A richly drawn, and at times disturbing, portrait of one man's descent into madness.

Michael Shannon is at his best as a man plagued by apocalyptic dreams that start to bleed into his everyday life. It's one of the best independent American films of the last decade, playing on current concerns about the future of the planet.

There's something about Michael Shannon's looming height and malleable features that makes him a natural fit for playing tortured souls.

Nichols has nothing positive to say, and spends more than two hours saying it. It's a superficial movie pretending to be deep.

Parlays contemporary fears into the kind of relatable apocalyptic drama that relies less on big special effects and more on the ambiguous mental state of its protagonist.

An intriguing, painful film about the angst that's currently in the air, about misreading the runes, about embarking on actions that might make us laughing stocks, about taking wagers with and against history.

A film for troubled times, Take Shelter taps into current anxieties about economic meltdown and climate change disaster with its scarily apt depiction of a man driven to the edge by apocalyptic fears.

An impressively sustained slow-burn parable from writer-director Jeff Nichols, shot with ominous beauty, guarding its mysteries with care.

Like a laissez-passer to our apocalypse sensors.

The film's power should reside in this agonised human dilemma, but in the end it becomes a rather self-important shaggy dog story.

Fear is the American vice ... Take Shelter latches on to something deep and true within many of us.

As in Todd Haynes's 1995 masterpiece, Safe, we are in a world that can't be pinned down.

The performances and themes of this psychological drama are all in five-star territory, it's just a shame all the good work is let down by a seriously drawn-out plot.

A kind of inverted version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" with an end of the world obsession by a Joe Lunchpail type guy rather than UFO's. My pick for best movie of 2011.

The supernatural horror/suburban drama mash-up doesn't always sit well, but there's no need to take shelter from the Shannon/Nichols partnership.

An intense drama of mental meltdown and domestic apocalypse for an age of anxiety.

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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/take_shelter/

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