La Presse – Marie-Christine Blais – 4 stars

… a pair of exceptional actors, great direction and some fundamental questions; what more could you ask for?

… a tremendous acting duel, reminiscent of the power of the Sean Penn-Susan Sarandon pairing in Dead Man Walking.

Planete.qc.ca – 4 stars

… Every actor must dream of such a role - or rather roles, plural. By turns anxious, violent and rebellious, dignified, obnoxious, troublesome and provocative, stark raving mad, repentant and pleading, perfectly controlled; Roy Dupuis achieves ultimate salvation and demonstrates, once again, his immense talent. Whatever attitude he adopts, he has to let it out slowly – close ups on his face. There are moments of great emotion – especially if you are a mother – but surprising as it sounds, there are laughs too!

Lecinema.ca – Stéphanie Nolin  - 4 stars

… Roy Dupuis gives an unforgettable and most intense performance. Effective across the whole range, he wages a fierce battle with the prison director played by Serge Houde, who is also remarkable.

… With a hard-hitting premise and amazing performances, Manners of Dying is an encounter not to be missed.

Montreal Mirror – Sarah Rowland

When I first moved here from Vancouver, I noticed something different in the air. After a few mighty whiffs, I realized what it was: I was no longer in Callum Keith Rennie country; I was in the heartland of Roy Dupuis. There's no doubt about it: the 41-year-old actor with the provocative jawline is the sacred cow of contemporary Québécois cinema, and mainstream audiences can't get enough of their domestic treasure. So it only makes sense that Montreal's answer to De Niro would star in the opening movie at this year's Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois.

Sensass

With the Jutra prize in his pocket for Mémoires affectives, Roy Dupuis isn’t done impressing us. In the film Manners of Dying, he delivers THE performance of his career!  [ …] The film forces us to think about the death penalty which, even though it has disappeared in Canada, is still carried out in some American states. A disturbing and troubling film, but above all a Roy Dupuis at the top of his game, sparing himself nothing and forcing us to plunge right in with him …

And finally ….

Danièle St-Denis – her first impressions to RDO by email

Finally, it’s over. I’ve seen it. It was worth the wait. Flabbergasted? … no. I know Roy’s merits too well – I don’t need another demonstration. If journalists and cinema buffs still hadn’t realised what a great actor Roy was before Manners of Dying, it’s because they were blind or indifferent to his talents. But both director Jeremy Peter Allen and Roy’s counterpart in the film, Serge Houde, who were there yesterday at the screening seemed to have been very aware of Roy’s potential, particularly Serge Houde, who told us about Roy’s amazing look which, however, he was not able to define completely. Lacking the French vocabulary in my opinion, Mr Houde has been living in British Columbia for years and French is no longer his first language. You need quite a vocabulary to deal with this look, as I well know, despite never having set eyes on him. But I know this look in almost all its nuances and aspects, and those belonging to Kevin Barlow are rich and versatile, complex and often heart-rending. Searching. Looking to waste time or to speed the pace up. Roy gives everything he’s got, particularly in his depiction of the fear and anguish of a man who knows he is going to die. With his whole body at times. It’s impossible not to believe it. Christian << Danièle’s husband >> noticed this physical way of expressing emotion. It was the first thing he said to me as we came out of the cinema.

I hardly dare to imagine what the film might have been like if the director and crew had had more financing. With a ridiculous budget of 1 million dollars, this film has done wonders with nothing. However, the copy we had yesterday at the Cinématèque wasn’t excellent. I’ve become pernickety about this. Cinema is the art of the image above all. I like and appreciate the sharpness and detail of film. Oh well. On the other hand the soundtrack is nice. The music and the sound in general. The sounds of the doors, the footsteps, the breathing and the voices are unusually intense. And what can you say about James Gray’s camerawork? Sometimes so close to Roy’s body in amazing shots. I would have liked him to have been more intimate in his relations with him but maybe it was the director’s wish to keep a distance from his subject. I was going to write ‘his guinea pig’ because more than once I thought that Kevin seemed like a laboratory rat.

Well, I don’t want to say too much, unless you’re consumed with curiosity and you want to know more. All the same, I’ll keep bulk of it for the chapter I’m going to write on Kevin, and which will focus on death, because this film deals a lot more with the anguish created by death than with the death penalty. One image has haunted me since yesterday: that of straps, the sound of straps. Everything is based on that. That’s the cruellest thing about the film, this way they are tied down.

Right, I’ll stop. He did a great job. He can be proud of it. He was generous, committed and superb. He told Francis Leclerc that he was one of the greats when he received his Jutra for Best Actor. He too is one of the greats even though too few of us Quebecois recognise it. I’m going back to see Manners of Dying in French when it comes out but I had to hear the original version. For the intonation in the voices. The soft calm voices of the executioners, the terrified, anxious, howling, heart-rending ones of the dying. Now I can listen to Roy dubbed, because I know what Kevin Barlow is made of.