First Reformed

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" is the kind of film that will stay with you long after the credits.

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

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.

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...

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...

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

First Reformed deserves all praise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

An unforgettable powerhouse.

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...

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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...