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Hey, Mickey, You’re So Fine | Mickey Rourke knocks out the critics at TIFF with his galvanizing performance in The Wrestler.

Scott Foundas, LA Weekly | “Rourke doesn’t just play this role — he lives it, moment by moment, to one’s consistent astonishment. Those newspaper and magazine clippings that pass by underneath the opening credits of The Wrestler heralding The Ram as the next great thing in pro wrestling? Those could just as soon be the myriad interviews and profiles of Rourke himself that proliferated in the 1980s — in those days, everyone thought this electrifying young actor was certain to be the next Brando. Then, like The Ram, Rourke had his own years in the desert, during which he embarked on a professional boxing career, spent too much time in tanning salons and starring in softcore sex romps, and finally landed in direct-to-video Siberia. Now, at 52, he has given the kind of performance that caps, redefines, and reinvents careers, inhabiting a character at the end of his tether with all the lived-in authority of someone who has known what it’s like to be there. Once upon a time, Mickey Rourke coulda been a contender for Heavyweight Acting Champion of the World. With The Wrestler, that title is once again his to lose.”

Todd McCarthy, Variety | “Talk about comebacks. Rourke creates a galvanizing, humourous, deeply moving portrait that instantly takes its place among the great, iconic screen performances. Physically imposing at 57, with a face that bespeaks untold battering and alteration, Rourke is simply staggering. The camera is rarely off him, and one doesn’t want it to be, so entirely does he express the full life of this man with his every word and gesture.”

James Rocchi, Cinematical | “If a complicated, messy personal life were all it took to deliver a great performance, Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson would have more Oscars than Katharine Hepburn. Rourke’s work in The Wrestler is physical, invested, powerful, and sprawling — but it’s also quiet, sad, and hauntingly wounded, too. The Wrestler is a fascinating, rich, unblinking look at the dark, hunched mean streak that lies curled and poisonous inside of so much American popular entertainment and of so much American life. It’s early to say this, but The Wrestler is one of the most grimly exciting, magnetically repellent movies we’ve had in a long time; it’s flat-out one of the best American movies of 2008.”