Bernie

    Bernie
    2012

    Synopsis

    In small-town Texas, affable and popular mortician Bernie Tiede strikes up a friendship with Marjorie Nugent, a wealthy widow well known for her sour attitude. When she becomes controlling and abusive, Bernie goes to great lengths to remove himself from her grasp.

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    Cast

    • Jack BlackBernie Tiede
    • Shirley MacLaineMarjorie Nugent
    • Matthew McConaugheyDanny Buck Davidson
    • Brady ColemanScrappy Holmes
    • Richard RobichauxLloyd Hornbuckle
    • Rick DialDon Leggett
    • Brandon SmithSheriff Huckabee
    • Larry Jack DotsonRev. Woodard
    • Merrilee McCommasMolly
    • Mathew GreerCarl

    Recommendations

    • 100

      Time Out

      Matthew McConaughey finally locates his perfect métier as the town's Fordian skeptic, a district attorney who smells a rat.
    • 88

      Observer

      It's a delectable slice of Southern Gothic humor, a side show of rednecks and Bubbas and Aunt Tooties.
    • 83

      The A.V. Club

      Though the lightness of Bernie can get disconcerting at times, even cartoonish, Linklater approaches the story with a bemused curiosity that seems about right under the circumstances.
    • 80

      Village Voice

      Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic.
    • 70

      Variety

      Pitch-perfect performances by Shirley MacLaine and an unusually restrained Jack Black hold together this offbeat true-crime saga, but Linklater's keen eye for human eccentricity flowers most memorably on the periphery.
    • 70

      The New Yorker

      It's an odd movie - mild in tone and circumspect, yet darkly funny, and done in a hybrid form that I don't think has been used so thoroughly before.
    • 60

      The Hollywood Reporter

      More than the film that surrounds him, Jack Black is worth the price of admission in Bernie, an oddball May-December true life crime story that would have profited from being a whole lot darker and full-bodied than it is.
    • 58

      Entertainment Weekly

      All those twangy, homespun observations interrupt and annotate the narrative until Black and MacLaine's scenes start to feel as trivial as reenactments on a true-crime TV show.

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    • bentonkat