Metacritic reviews

Chukwu maintains an impressive command over her material, but Woodard herself becomes the movie’s central storyteller.

It's the humanity and compassion invested across all the principal characters that makes this contemplative examination of the terrible weight of taking a life so commanding.

It’s a sterling piece of American realism, powered by the transfixing spectacle of a great actor at the peak of her powers.

There’s little room to breathe in writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s constricting, devastating drama Clemency, an intentionally airless film processing a tough subject through an unusual viewpoint.

Clemency is a thoroughly draining experience as if we’re placed in purgatory with no means of escape, but it’s ultimately powerful in the ways it shows how the death penalty has consequences for everyone involved.

In Woodard’s stillness is a singularly great performance from a career decorated with them.

Chinonye Chukwu’s film is a morality play with a true sense of contradiction and melancholia.

If Woodard is hoping for her overdue second Oscar nomination after 1983’s “Cross Creek,” she’s got a decent shot with this excruciating character arc. Yet, the actress is even better in the scenes where Bernadine simply gets drunk, even if she still can’t talk about anything but work.

Clemency is a staggering achievement in its portrayal of a story that we often ignore out of simple spite or ignorance that humanizes all angles with compassion.

Alfre Woodard may have graced us with the performance of her career.