First Reformed

Thoughtful, moving, overreaching and uncompromising, «First Reformed» is a tremendously tormented work. Ethan Hawke delivers a performanc...

The film itself, shot in Academy ratio in the dead of winter, is quieter and more sensitive than anything else Schrader has directed, with Ethan Ha...

Paul Schrader has always been a faith-based filmmaker in the truest and most challenging sense, and First Reformed is the sort of stimulating...

It is the portrait of a soul in torment, all the more powerful for being so rigorously conceived and meticulously executed.

Shaker furniture in movie form – stark, plain, conceived in austere and intelligent good taste; beautifully made, in fact, but maybe more desi...

They are weird moments of almost hypnotic transcendence, but at the center of it is that tortured God’s lonely man character perfectly embodi...

Schrader dissects the roots, hypocrisies and virtues of Christianity through a series of increasingly troubling symbols… Not an easy watch, bu...

Schrader’s best in yonks, a powerful meditation on faith’s place in the modern world. Hawke, as a kind of Travis Bickle in a dog c...

The sort of stimulating work that a writer-director of a certain age can deliver when he returns to his creative sweet spot; rejoice, Schrader...

First Reformed is the type of film that leaves you with more profound questions than answers. You’ll probably need to see it two, maybe three times...

This scenario is serious almost to the point of silliness: It could be parody of a morality play. But the heaviness is also essential to the a...

First Reformed can hardly imagine a hopeful future for the world, [yet] the film is full of longing for redemption… Toller hopes that his jour...

Nobody, not even a hard-core Schrader fan, could claim that First Reformed makes for easy listening, or viewing. If anything, it outstrips its...

The result is an embittered look at our world through the eyes of someone who’s increasingly horrified to be a part of it, and a film tha...

A «Taxi Driver» for the present day, with Hawke in a career-best performance.

Yet ultimately it’s so good, and the attention to truthfulness so intense, that Schrader writes himself into a narrative dead end and to ...

Part of the movie’s understated triumph lies in its casting: Hawke is an actor who clearly cares, and worries, a lot–the tree of life is practicall...

A work that most 30 year old’s would welcome, and one that a 71 year old might have thought would never come around again.

First Reformed is bleak and bone dry, a little self-indulgent, and it screams neither «fun» nor «production values.» It is the opposite of&nbs...

In one of his best roles, Hawke is galvanizing as a man who has lost his way and is desperately searching for meaning in his life. And as Mary...

You won’t see a more textured film this summer.

Not only is this faith-in-crisis drama one of the legendary writer-director’s most incendiary films ever, it’s one of the year’s...

A fascinating work of almost mixed media: Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson meet outraged editorial cartooning meet the it-always-builds-to-violenc...

First Reformed is rigorously austere (as befits the author of Transcendental Style in Film), but every frame suggests a longing for a world el...

An embittered look at our world through the eyes of someone who’s increasingly horrified to be a part of it, and a film that&rsquo...

Schrader is positing that the real world is, and should be, about the life of the mind, the health of the soul-and love. Ultimately, that is where...

First Reformed has a confidence about it, the presence of filmmaking consciousness that can’t do wrong, because this time he knows exactly wha...

It’s a powerful, disturbing crisis of faith drama that takes on the raiments of a thriller, and a tour de force for the understated...

A direct expression from the soul onto celluloid, unvarnished and uncompromised, and Schrader’s best film in years.

First Reformed manages to be ascetic, poetic, and prophetic. It’s at once centering, thrilling, and disturbing.

A stunning, enrapturing film, a crowning work by one of the American cinema’s most essential artists.

Grapples with eternal questions of faith, to be sure, but confronts just as powerfully, if not more so, the urgent matter of how to live a goo...

First Reformed begins to get really interesting when Schrader turns the tables on his hero-and us, and possibly himself.

Schrader’s film is a wise, shocking, intellectually prodigious masterpiece.

Until I saw Toller, I didn’t know the human soul could frown.

Schrader’s chief influence here, as in many of his other films, is the great French director Robert Bresson, especially his «Diary of a Country Pri...

First Reformed is a bleak, punishing movie and the furthest thing imaginable from an easy crowdpleaser. But Hawke juices it with an austere se...

An act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of ...

Schrader’s chief influence here, as in many of his other films, is the great French director Robert Bresson… But Bresson’s spare stylis...

First Reformed…may be the full realization of Schrader’s vision.

Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is an amazing examination of faith, a film that stays with you long after you have left the theater.

Schrader’s film is a wise, shocking, intellectually prodigious masterpiece. It’s a classic Schrader slow burn that seems to reach, in its...

A stunning, enrapturing film, a crowning work by one of the American cinema’s most essential artists.

Greatness is often intertwined with insanity, and there’s no way to describe the finale of First Reformed as anything other than a dual...

Thoughtful, moving, overreaching and uncompromising, First Reformed is a tremendously tormented work from writer-director Paul Schrader.

The searching loss-of-faith drama First Reformed is the happy result of Paul Schrader’s entering the what-the-hell-let’s-go-for-it stag...

First Reformed doesn’t come off as pastiche, or a raking-up of old ideas – largely because Schrader and his cast commit to the project with sh...

Quieter and more sensitive than anything else Schrader has directed, with Ethan Hawke giving one of his finest and most moving performances in the...

«First Reformed» takes some wild, unexpected and uncomfortable turns in its final act that will surely shock some, anger others and disturb ju...

Mr. Schrader…is 71, and has had a long and varied career, but «First Reformed» nonetheless feels like a fresh discovery. More than t...

An unforgettable powerhouse.

After more than 20 features, Paul Schrader has been reborn with First Reformed, an unhurried, furious, deeply agonized look at faith and...

Shot in 1.37:1 aspect ratio, and devoid of a conventional musical score, it’s an austere examination of devotion, grief, self...

A fascinating meditation on inner turmoil in which doing the right thing can lead down many wrong directions.

Paul Schrader’s best for 20 years. A stunning study of one man’s flaws and an apocalyptic vision of mankind’s fate.

The movie’s conclusion pits religion against personal desire in remarkably visceral terms.

Ultimately its sheer archness reveals Paul Schrader as a gifted and deeply persuasive evangelist of the transcendental style – if not quite&nb...

An act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of ...

This knuckle-whitening depiction of a man of God toppling into his own spiritual abyss is one of Schrader’s finest and most excoriating films...

Hawke’s performance is his most mature to date, a masterpiece of a man who cannot work himself out and yet is compelled to try.

The film is a zinger, with Hawke giving Toller the hungry, doomed conviction of a Graham Greene hero.

Schrader’s best in yonks, a powerful meditation on faith’s place in the modern world. Hawke, as a kind of Travis Bickle in a dog collar, gives...

Schrader is the divine mortal who wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. He’s as passionate as ever; what he has lost is his discipline.

What keeps us alert as viewers is not the slow disintegration of this man’s faith, but the deep ambiguity about where the film’s sympat...

It is an exquisite piece of filmmaking and also a blunt, pulpy instrument, a despairing, fully sustained howl of a movie that is easily t...

«First Reformed» is the kind of film that will stay with you long after the credits.

Singular in its distillation of Schrader’s decades-spanning preoccupations of film criticism and filmmaking as well as his religious backgrou...

Hawke is too committed for Toller’s humanity to not shine through. It’s a layered, transformative performance, his gritting, introverted Tolle...

The conflicts Schrader exposes are too pressing, too raw, too obvious in their own right to demand subtlety. That makes First Reformed a fasci...

It lingers uneasily in the subconscious. Furious and darkly funny, it’s a tight, explosive encapsulation of our very specific moment in...

Paul Schrader offers one of the year’s best movies-a faith-in-crisis powerhouse about a pastor – Ethan Hawke hitting a new career peak-w...

Schrader and his cast commit to the project with sharpened and unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird, with violence...

The movie’s concerns are obvious, not subtle, and while intellectual energy abounds, laying in subtext, building underlying tension physical...

After more than 20 features, Paul Schrader has been reborn with First Reformed, an unhurried, furious, deeply agonized look at faith and...

First Reformed has its steeple in the clouds and its foundation on solid ground.

At once ruminative and shocking, godwardly inclined and repellently graphic, First Reformed is indisputably the finest film Schrader has directed s...

Is it too early to call this Schrader’s masterpiece?

It’s a gorgeous film, mourning the impossibility of being alive as it celebrates that which binds us, a conscious-rattling, viscera-stirring p...

First Reformed is a deeply felt, deeply thought picture; impressive in its seriousness and often gripping in the way it frames itself as a deb...

First Reformed deserves all praise.

This is a film that wrestles with its themes through rigorously crafted dialogue; Schrader sees no benefit in underlining those words with sho...

First Reformed hums disquietingly along at Schrader’s own clockwork pace which, like Hawke’s mesmerizing performance, is austere, stoic...

The latest film from pugnacious director/writer Paul Schrader is as austere and revelatory as a church confessional…It’s a bleak portrait of...

In «First Reformed," Paul Schrader courts respectability and leaves it in the dust, getting stoned on excess. But make no mistake: He’s still...

It’s a remarkable addition to the small but growing canon of American films that aren’t afraid to stare straight into an abyss with all of the...

This is a movie about faith tested, and people trying to reconcile hope with a world that can feel hopeless. It’s a film to be seen in&n...

Harrowing, but with a wry humor, and utterly transporting, Paul Schrader has synthesized his complex religious upbringing with modern anxietie...

Full of conviction, First Reformed feels like a lifetime of preoccupations and traumas distilled beautifully, accompanied with a haunting spar...

First Reformed may well be the ultimate auteur object for Schrader apostles. But ultimately its sheer archness reveals Paul Schrader as a gifted an...

A spare, meticulously crafted movie.

Schrader…has made a fine existential-crisis movie. And for all its serious intent, it isn’t torture to watch.