Release: Three Rounds

 

Three Rounds

Genre: Drama/Sports

Director: Jeff Nichols

Writer: Holden Abbott

Cast: Lucas Hedges, Nick Robinson, Boyd Holbrook, Ray McKinnon, Isabela Merced, Lily Rabe

Budget: $28,000,000

Domestic Box Office: $20,590,734

Foreign Box Office: $13,795,856

Total Profit: -$20,100,201

Reaction: The 32 season-long box office hot streak has finally ended for superstar director Jeff Nichols. Meanwhile, Holden Abbott still finds himself looking for his first box office success story.

“Three Rounds is a bleak, rigorously controlled sports drama that finds Jeff Nichols favoring silence, repetition, and moral suffocation over conventional uplift. The performances, particularly Lucas Hedges and Boyd Holbrook, are deeply committed, but the film’s unrelenting heaviness and deliberate pacing will test even sympathetic viewers. While its portrait of inherited violence and masculine expectation is incisive, the film often lingers so long in misery that its insights begin to feel redundant rather than cumulative. Three Rounds is less a crowd-pleasing sports drama than a slow, bruising excavation of damage passed from father to son. Holden Abbott has struck again, making me think he is a writer to watch here in LRF.” - Elena Strauss, The Continental Screen Review

"Three Rounds is an affecting, if somewhat overlong, boxing drama more interested in family wounds than championship belts. Jeff Nichols brings a grounded, melancholic atmosphere to the material, letting silences and strained relationships carry much of the emotional weight. Boyd Holbrook and Ray McKinnon are especially strong, while the final act lands with genuine emotional force. Though it occasionally leans too hard on familiar boxing-family dysfunction tropes, the film’s sincerity and performances keep it compelling." - Allen Poole, AV Club

"Three Rounds struggles under the weight of cliché and some baffling casting decisions. Most notably, Lucas Hedges—talented as he undeniably is—feels deeply miscast as Tommy, never fully believable as a hardened boxer raised in a rough, blue-collar fight family. The script repeatedly leans on familiar boxing-drama shorthand—abusive father, broken sons, buried grief—without much originality, and the pacing often feels punishingly repetitive." - Katie Barnes, Washington Herald

Rated R for language, violence, and thematic material