You can be pretty sure that there’ll not be another film this year like BLACK SNAKE MOAN. Director Craig Brewer’s follow-up to his Southern rap sensation HUSTLE & FLOW is a tale of sex, sin, salvation and the dirty South; it features electric blues, OxyContin, Justin Timberlake and a half-naked Christina Ricci chained to a radiator. It’s over-the-top and totally preposterous, but, amazingly, very entertaining and, if not really affecting, at least engaging on an emotional level. (...) Jackson is great, and while he’s been in his share of turkeys, Brewer knows how to use his bombast perfectly; after all, this is more or less an exploitation movie. Ricci is, well, in the words of the woman sitting next to me at the screening, “she’s like a little animal!” Her Rae is wild-eyed, almost feral, screaming and writhing in her cut-off t-shirt and underwear. Really, you won’t see another performance like it any time soon. It’s astoundingly nutso.

• http://www.montrealmirror.com

BLACK SNAKE MOAN, qui tire son titre d'une chanson de Blind Lemon Jefferson, est la plus récente réalisation de Craig Brewer. Comme dans son film précédent, HUSTLE & FLOW, Brewer accorde une grande attention aux ambiances et aux textures, nous faisant pratiquement sentir la sueur, la fumée de cigarette et la gnôle. On retrouve aussi sa capacité remarquable à utiliser la musique, les personnages parvenant à s'exprimer le mieux lorsqu'ils retrouvent leur voix et chantent le rap (comme Terrence Howard dans HUSTLE & FLOW) ou le blues (comme le fait admirablement Jackson ici). La simple idée d'un Noir qui enchaîne une petite Blanche à son radiateur en choquera certainement certains et Brewer s'amuse bien à courtiser la controverse avec certaines scènes; mais au final, les excès de BLACK SNAKE MOAN s'avèrent justifiés, réfléchis et ressentis.

• http://www.voir.ca

(...) It’s outlandish, hilariously overripe, and possibly sexist: You’d expect no less from Craig Brewer, the writer and director who made the passionate case for how hard it is out there for a pimp. But I loved the picture’s tabloid energy and heart. At bottom, BLACK SNAKE MOAN is an old-fashioned feel-good, Sunday-schoolish kind of parable about a broken, bitter ex-alcoholic who’s spiritually reborn by, uh, chaining a little white nympho in shorty-cutoffs to his radiator. (...) Okay, it is pretty sexist. (...) Jackson’s character (...) is a former blues singer, and the Deep South of BLACK SNAKE MOAN is a world of bottomless blues - and bottomless greens and reds and pinks and yellows and browns. It’s a very colorful movie. Ricci’s flesh tones jump out of the screen; you almost forget how much weight she has lost. Those eyes were huge to begin with; now they look like something popping out of a shrunken head. (...) Jackson and Ricci are marvelous. So is the bucket-of-blood blues soundtrack, especially the song that goes, “I love you/Love them chicken heads, too.” Justin Timberlake doesn’t sing, but he gives a fine, sensitive performance as (Ricci)’s fiancé, who suffers from his own uncontrollable spasms. Brewer directs as if his actors make him high.

• http://nymag.com

Mix Brigitte Bardot in ET DIEU CRÉA LA FEMME with Carroll Baker in BABY DOLL, sex it up times 10 and you have a notion of the effect of Christina Ricci in BLACK SNAKE MOAN. (...) It's obvious from this film and HUSTLE & FLOW that music means a great deal to Brewer, and hardcore blues fans may groove on every minute of the musicianship here. But the dramatic line suffers considerably from the truckful of tunes offered up, resulting in a well-executed, handsome-looking film that runs perhaps 20 minutes longer than it should given its storyline. Toplined Jackson is very fine as the principled, emotionally tender but tough-talking country man who, befitting his name, takes it upon himself to bring the community's most scorned woman back to life. (...) But it is Ricci who will be remembered when all else about the film has been forgotten.

• http://www.variety.com

She's a backwoods nymphomaniac, and he's a Southern-fried cuckold, and together they make one very odd couple in BLACK SNAKE MOAN. This ludicrous Southern melodrama with over-the-top performances from Samuel L. Jackson, Christina Ricci and Justin Timberlake is so convinced of its own righteousness that it almost makes a damn good comedy. Certainly the image of Ricci wearing panties and a peek-a-boo top getting dragged around by Jackson tugging on a chain wrapped around her tiny waist is one any publisher of '50s dime novels would have loved for a book cover if only he dared. Screenwriter-director Craig Brewer likes to make films about how music can heal people, and he got away with some pretty ludicrous fantasies about pimps and whores in his last film, HUSTLE & FLOW, thanks to the music and winning performances. The blues music in BLACK SNAKE MOAN is superfine, but my oh my, what to make of the ripe Southern cliches and this absurd story. The film is so jaw-dropping awful that it just might become a boxoffice hit. The cast certainly is a plus as long as no one minds that Jackson sings and Timberlake doesn't.

• http://www.hollywoodreporter.com