Tom Hardy attacks the role like a psychopath with a claw hammer. It’s hard to tell whether he inhabits the character or it inhabits him. It’s the kind of high-intensity performance that leaves you as breathless as after a punch to the gut.

Hardy, pate shaved into a hard, bony dome that seems designed for head-butting, stares down the camera as if it had just insulted his mother. He challenges the audience to hold his gaze. He addresses us directly, smashing down the fourth wall with pile-driver delivery and a physical presence not unlike a wrecking ball. It is a jaw-dropping piece of acting. 

- from a review of Bronson in The Times. (Yes, I do have a certain affinity towards well-worded reviews about Tom…)

Forrest, for his part, plunges his hands into the pockets of a long gray cardigan which he accessorizes with a hat pulled low, a cigar jammed into his mouth and brass knuckle-dusters. With these he reconfigures the face of anyone who crosses him, and Hillcoat is not someone to leave such deeds to our imagination. Tom Hardy rounds off his portrait of Forrest with an extraordinary bass grunt, meant to indicate satisfaction, scorn and pretty much everything in between; he sounds like Lee Marvin waking up in a pigsty. Even when a naked redhead glides into his room, after dark, and stands at the foot of the bed, all he can manage is the same noise, which she interprets, for some reason, as a prelude to intercourse rather than a request for Alka-Selzer - the hot new product of that year, which shows that Prohibition was a bust. “You’re just goin’ to watch me forever?”, she asks. It’s an idea. 

- from a (mixed) review of Lawless in The New Yorker.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Tom Hardy is a joy to watch as the eldest, cardigan wearing brother. Unlike his menacing, outwardly imposing Bane, his Forrest Bondurant is knows the value of movement and voice. You always got a sense with Bane that there was a bit of a showman in him. There’s none of that with Forrest, just calculated, caged danger. The character is not big on speeches or grand gestures in public, and Hardy brings a quiet serenity to a man who is not afraid to get his hands dirty. Much of that can be attributed to the way the character speaks, offering not much more than a monosyllabic “huh” or “hmm” to convey an entire array of feelings. It’s a really interesting role for Hardy to take on and it fits him like a glove.

(Source: awardscircuit.com)

And Tom Hardy, as Robert Dudley, is a right piece — 10 per cent sexual petulance, 90 per cent straining hose, 100 per cent likely to provoke the Google search “Tom Hardy” “early art film” “nude scene”. 

- from a review of The Virgin Queen in The Times. All true.

Tom Hardy is great fun in the role of the shambling, muttering Forrest, surely the hardest man in history to habitually sport a cardigan. - The Times

Forrest is seen as “immortal” in his small town, and not just because his brass knuckles assist him in savage, gruesome pummelings. With his glum growl of resignation after each beating of a would-be killer, he makes clear that there’s no childlike pleasure here. He’s simply choosing not to die. This performance by Mr. Hardy is the best the actor has turned in yet: the Brit, whose physical transformations over the past few years have been misconstrued as acting, is here a solid wall of flesh, but with the taciturn grimness to match.  - New York Observer

tomhardyvariations:

Lawless Reviewed: Dark & Haunting With Flawless Lead Performances

… As the enigmatic Forest, the unspoken head of the household, Hardy possesses an almost ageless quality, which makes him unbelievably interesting to watch. Forest is a character steeped in mystery and legend and Hillcoat cleverly plays on this through a combination of camera work and Hardy’s intuitive performance.

Hardy is shot in such a way as to emphasise his formidable size and youthful good looks yet he carries himself with a kind of weary fatigue and communicates through a series of unintelligible grunts, making it impossible to deduce his age and contributing to the mystical aura that surrounds him. Parts of his dialogue are lost in the garbled thickness of his southern drawl, but you almost get the sense that you don’t need to understand him, as his hulking physicality is such an imposing presence. Despite the attention paid to Jack’s coming of age as he attempts to ape his brothers and become more involved in the family business, the viewer can’t help but pine for Hardy’s presence when he is off-screen.

This is not to discount LaBeouf’s fine portrayal of youngest brother Frank [sic; Jack]; he turns in a very capable performance and this film is as much a coming of age story as it is an insight into the hardships of living through the Depression. However, Hardy is an acting beast and LaBeouf is smart to simply compliment his performance rather than try to counter it. You get a real sense of the brotherly camaraderie between them and Hillcoat does a superb job of communicating this without obvious exposition, instead opting to use simple yet effective visual imagery.

full review

Oh, so true! We were all pining for Forrest whenever he wasn’t around. And I loved the way Tom moved, both with a very intimidating swagger and menace, but also like he’s a battered old man. It’s brilliant. Also, he’s not that difficult to understand!   Granted, we had subtitles, but still, he sounded quite clear to me. He does a very convincing southern drawl. And grunts. I’m in love with those grunts!

“And no one is darker than Bane (Tom Hardy), a battering ram of a villain, his face covered by a grille that feeds him medicine to alleviate pain he’s suffered from childhood. Hardy’s face is covered for 99.9 percent of the film, but his physical and vocal performance is riveting.” 

-Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

“But it’s Bane who steals the show. After Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn as the Joker in the last film, it was a masterstroke to feature a villain who’s the polar-opposite of the maniacal criminal. With Hardy putting on 30lbs of muscle, the character comes across as less flesh-and-blood and more like an unstoppable juggernaut. His character’s back story provides one of the film’s series of neat twists at the end. 

-David Edwards, Mirror.co.uk

“If it’s at all possible, Bane is even more nihilistic than Heath Ledger’s Joker from The Dark Knight. And while it would be almost impossible to top the late Ledger’s incendiary performance, which won him a posthumous Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Hardy’s Bane comes awfully close. He’s mesmerizing on the screen, recalling Darth Vader in the original Star Wars.” 

- Peter Howell, Toronto Star

TDKR may not top the year’s earlier megahit, The Avengers, at the box office, but who cares? The Avengers was kid stuff. This is for grownups, with bold, nuanced performances (expect Oscar nominations for Bale, Hardy and—as Bruce’s devoted butler, Alfred—Michael Caine) and apocalyptic import. For once, a comic-book movie comes within hailing distance of the Greek myths or a Jonathan Swift satire. The Dark Knight Rises is that big, that bitter—a film of grand ambitions and epic achievement.

- Richard Corliss, Time 

An old review (from the New Statesman, Oct, 2007) of Stuart a Life Backwards which I think captures some of what is so great about this extraordinary film:

Benedict Cumberbatch as the posh, slightly nerdy Masters and Tom Hardy as the slurring, staggering (he had muscular dystrophy, on top of everything else) Stuart. Cumberbatch is a scene stealer of such prowess that he can nick an entire movie from its star with a handful of lines (if you don’t believe me, see Starter for Ten, whose lead, supposedly, is James McAvoy). Here, however, his performance was deliberately tamped down. He brought Masters alive with the smallest of tics - slow-blinking myopic eyes , the odd wry look - and managed to avoid making him seem like a patronising prig, a serious danger, given how little time he had to establish his character.

It was Hardy, though, who broke your heart. I can’t remember the last time I saw a performance as convincing as this. Usually, when actors take on “extreme” roles - think Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot- you can see the hard labour that has gone into the acting, and it’s exhausting; part of you just wants to shout: “Oh, speak properly, for God’s sake!” Not here. Hardy was Stuart, and every time he was on screen - which was most of the time - 1 was mesmerised. The clumpy feet, the low-slung trousers, the way his expression changed in a moment, like the sun going behind the clouds: it was all there, almost as if the real Stuart had come back to remind us all what middle-class “scum ponces” we are, with our futile liberal guilt and our lazy assumptions and our need to have a good cry in front of the television on a Sunday night.