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The Woman King Reviews

If I could only use one word to describe The Woman King as a historical action epic, it would be “quintessential”.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 2, 2024

The Woman King is more than just a historical action film; it is a genuinely rare example of breathing life into the past with verve and imagination.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

There’s a certain tenderness yet mightiness with which director Prince-Bythewood choses to frame the story visually. Her exceptional direction enables an experience that is as emotionally invigorating as it is empowering and inspirational.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024

To see Black women at the centrepiece of a Hollywood epic like this is both refreshing and extremely overdue.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 12, 2024

The Woman King achieves cinematic royalty with its extremely skillful, well-crafted, and purposeful picture that tells a narrative of empowerment and humanity. It’s well-crafted from start to finish, with Davis shining in the starring role.

Full Review | Sep 26, 2023

writer Dana Stevens, story contributor Maria Bello – more known for her acting (“A History of Violence”) – and Prince-Bythewood continue an emerging cinematic trend of alternate, redemptive histories that bend toward utopianism

Full Review | Aug 16, 2023

Davis elevates this standard story with the emotion and dire she brings to her performance.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Aug 9, 2023

For viewers who choose to focus on the adrenaline rush of the feminist warriors ready to challenge the patriarchy, The Woman King proudly wears its crown.

Full Review | Jul 27, 2023

Thuso Mbedu delivers one of the best feature film debut performances I've ever witnessed. The anti-slavery, anti-racism and equal human rights messages are well conveyed, but the authentic, emotionally resonant character dynamics stand out.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 25, 2023

While this is undoubtedly Viola Davis at her finest, the movie's breakout star is Thuso Mbedu as Nawi. It may be called The Woman King, but it's Mbedu that steals the spotlight in every frame.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

An instant classic, Viola Davis slays as always. Lashana Lynch is incredible, Sheila Atim is amazing, & Thuso Mbedu steals the show as the heart/soul of the entire film! Blythewood created an epic that we don’t see anymore from Hollywood.

Despite stumbles in terms of plot and pacing, The Woman King is a thrilling watch. This story, these women, and the film’s heart deserve to be seen on the biggest screen possible with an audience ready to go along for a wild ride.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

The movie fails to fulfil its potential except as a military action epic.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 17, 2023

A dazzler from Terence Blanchard’s symphonic score to Polly Morgan’s eye pleasing cinematography. Acting is A-1, particularly by Davis and Mbedu.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Apr 25, 2023

Viola Davis is a force unleashed, heading up a full-blooded tale of conflict set against the backdrop of the slave trade that offers both a twist on the traditional male-dominated warrior-epic and a look at a part of history Hollywood typically ignores

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 27, 2023

Its the emotional sparring between the women - as fierce as anything on the battle ground - that really holds the attention

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 17, 2023

If it had been a story about white people, it would have been a snore. But we have rarely, if ever, seen a movie quite like this one about powerful Black women, and the energy onscreen is infectious.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 13, 2023

…goes all in as a popular entertainment, rolling back the male-dominance of the action genre and replacing it with something smart, dynamic and female driven…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 19, 2023

As these women take their place in the kingdom of Dahomey and assert their power, The Woman King truly takes on new meaning, and finds relevance in the modern era.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 10, 2023

The film is shot impeccably well, scored passionately, and gives the viewer something to savor as they leave the theater.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 8, 2023

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Critic’s Pick

‘The Woman King’ Review: She Slays

Viola Davis leads a strong cast into battle in an epic from Gina Prince-Bythewood, inspired by real women warriors.

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By Manohla Dargis

The kinetic action adventure “The Woman King” is a sweeping entertainment, but it’s also a story of unwavering resistance in front of and behind the camera. The ascendancy of women filmmakers over the past decade is one of the great chapters in movie history, and as women have fought their way back into the field, they have also taken up space — on screens and in minds — long denied them. Their canvases are again as expansive as their desires.

Certainly one of the most expansive of these canvases is “The Woman King,” a drama about the real women soldiers of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, the movie is filled with palace intrigues, sumptuous ceremonies and stirring battles, and features, as golden-age Hollywood liked to brag, a cast of thousands (or thereabouts!). Yet while it evokes the old-fashioned spectacles the studios habitually turned out long before Marvel, there is no precedent for this one.

The story, as moviemakers also like to say, is “inspired” by real events, which in this case are mind-blowing. The tale is rooted in the women warriors of Dahomey whose exact origins remain obscured by tribal myths and oral traditions as well as the obviously biased, self-serving and at times contradictory accounts of European observers. It’s thought that the warriors emerged in the 17th century, and were part of a heavily female social organization that included lots of wives and his-and-her sides of the palatial compound. (The stronghold was about one-eighth the size of Central Park.)

The wives show up now and again in “The Woman King,” seated and standing in a cloud of regal hauteur. They’re lavishly coifed and luxuriously dressed, and, for the most part, passive, as inert and prettily posed as dolls waiting for someone to play with them. That would be King Ghezo, a young monarch amusingly played by John Boyega, who gives the character the nonchalant imperiousness of a very important person who doesn’t seem to do much other than the most essential thing: hold power. If Ghezo wears the crown lightly it’s only because others do his hard, dirty, sometimes murderous work.

It’s the women warriors who do much of the toughest work, and, of course, are the main attractions, which Prince-Bythewood announces at once. So, after a bit of quick, dutiful place-setting — it’s 1823 — the movie takes flight with a showy battle, a grab-you-by-the-throat entrance that gets the story going and blood flowing, yours included. Led by the battle-scarred General Nanisca (Viola Davis), the women soldiers, their bodies oiled to a high gleam, emerge like hallucinations that Prince-Bythewood makes palpably real. Suddenly, the screen fills with intense movement and by turns soaring and falling bodies.

The action scenes are visceral, and more or less rooted in the laws of physics. Even during the darkest of night, Prince-Bythewood anchors you both in the battlefield and the ensuing chaos of the fight, which tethers you visually and, by extension, strengthens the movie’s realism. Put differently, she puts you right on the ground so that you can watch these women fly. They do just that, not with superhero capes and fairy-tale enchantments, but with swords, javelins, twirling ropes and an occasional gun — as well as long, razored fingernails that scoop out enemy eyes, and thighs that crack men like walnuts.

The women are their own greatest weapons, and among everything else it addresses, “The Woman King” is about strong, dynamic Black women, their souls, minds and bodies. Prince-Bythewood frames these warriors, with their gradations of skin tones, lovingly and attentively. (The cinematographer is Polly Morgan.) You don’t need to be a scholar of old Hollywood, which divided Black performers in hierarchies of color, typecasting darker actors in servant roles, to grasp the greater implications of Prince-Bythewood foregrounding women like Davis, Sheila Atim and Lashana Lynch — it’s galvanizing.

The overstuffed story oscillates between intimate, sometimes soppy drama and world-shaking events, most profoundly in terms of the slave trade. That the Dahomey traffic in other people complicates the triumphalism of a movie that celebrates women’s power, a complexity that the story never satisfyingly engages. For the most part, the filmmakers — the script is by Dana Stevens, from a story by her and Maria Bello — navigate the political and moral thickets through Nanisca’s personal qualms about the trade, which she voices to the king, arguing that he can maintain his power more benignly.

Nanisca’s hopes and Dahomey’s future are tangled up with the schemes of the kingdom’s principal rival, the Oyo Empire (Jimmy Odukoya plays its swaggering leader), which also sells other human beings, including to the insatiable Europeans. Accurately portrayed or not, the images of the Oyo, who wear turbans wrapped around their heads and sweep in on horses, startlingly evokes the janjaweed , the mounted militiamen who beginning in the early 2000s ravaged western Sudan. The visual connection to these forces both adds to the movie’s overall sense of the past and bridges the horrors of 19th-century Africa with those of the continent’s post-colonial conflagrations.

Even as the script falters, that history and Prince-Bythewood’s direction imbue “The Women King” with an intensity that’s manifest in every fight and in the clenched faces and straining muscles of the warriors. When Nanisca rallies them before battle, thundering that they must fight or perish, it echoes the vow that it’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees. Women are taught to live on their knees, and part of what makes this film so moving is how it lays claim to a chapter in history that upends received ideas about gender even if the story is more complex than the movie suggests.

“The Woman King” drags here and there, weighted down principally by a subplot that grows more unpersuasive with each scene and involves an unruly young woman, Nawi (an appealing Thuso Mbedu), who’s dumped at the palace by her family. The character, a classic naïf who needs to be schooled and tested, is an obvious narrative contrivance that Mbedu fills in with grit and personality. In part, Nawi serves as a proxy for the audience, who follow her lead as she’s transformed into a fighter and learns from her mentor, Izogie, a ferocious warrior played by a fantastic, charismatic Lynch.

It’s disappointing that the script isn’t always up to its singular source material and Prince-Bythewood’s sure, steady direction. Certainly, if the writing were more nuanced and less bogged down by contemporary ideas about women’s roles — at one point, the movie shifts into a trauma-driven maternal melodrama — Davis would have far more to do than glower or dissolve in tears. She’s good at both, and she gives the role the steeliness it requires, but the character isn’t intricately detailed even if, when Nanisca raises her sword and rallies her women, you feel in your bones what is at stake in this fight.

The Woman King Rated PG-13 for human trafficking and battleground violence. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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