David M. Benett/Getty Images for FoxcatcherCritics are loving Channing Tatum's performance in the upcoming drama Foxcatcher!
In the new film, Tatum and costar Mark Ruffalo play real-life Olympic wrestling brothers Mark and David Schultz. Steve Carell stars as James du Pont, who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and shot and killed David in 1996.
While all three actors are being hailed for their performances, we can't help but wonder: Could Tatum be headed from Magic Mike pole-dancing to Oscar-award winning actor?! Here's what critics are saying about Tatum in Foxcatcher.
• Variety hails that Foxcatcher is "anchored by exceptional performances from Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo and an almost unrecognizable Steve Carell." They add, "Always at his best when he can bring his intense physicality to bear on a role (Magic Mike), Tatum delivers what is easily the most emotionally complex performance of his career, hulking through much of the picture exuding rage, surliness and disappointment."
• "While Carell dominates with his unexpected performance, he is superbly backed up by his co-stars," proclaims The Hollywood Reporter's review. "Playing a young man who doesn't have a clue how to articulate his feelings and suffers for it, Tatum is a smoldering, festering piece of emotional raw meat, able to be manipulated this way and that by his benefactor. You feel his pain."
• "[Carell is] amply supported by the rest of the cast, particularly Channing Tatum who turns his lunkishness to brilliantly doleful purpose and invests his role with an interiority of loneliness and self-loathing that by the end we could even see coming across even in his style of wrestling," writes, IndieWire. "Which, incidentally deserves praise all its own—we're no experts in the sport, but Tatum and Ruffalo both totally convinced in those fight scenes, especially the extended one of the two of them training that begins the film and that tells you, in course of a session that goes from cordial to aggressive, everything you need to know about their relationship."
Watch the Foxcatcher movie trailer for yourself!