First Reformed
A24 | Release Date: May 18, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
86
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 48 Critic Reviews
Positive:
45
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenFeb 6, 2019
First Reformed manages to be ascetic, poetic, and prophetic. It’s at once centering, thrilling, and disturbing. Read full review
100
Total FilmJamie GrahamJul 9, 2018
Paul Schrader’s best for 20 years. A stunning study of one man’s flaws and an apocalyptic vision of mankind’s fate. Read full review
100
VoxAlissa WilkinsonJun 14, 2018
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 implications — moral, ethical, political, and religious — that are required for this moment in our history. First Reformed is a confounding stunner of a movie and richly deserves our full, serious attention. Read full review
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayMay 25, 2018
At once ruminative and shocking, godwardly inclined and repellently graphic, First Reformed is indisputably the finest film Schrader has directed since his sensitive adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel “Affliction.” Read full review
100
Vanity FairK. Austin CollinsMay 24, 2018
Schrader’s film is a wise, shocking, intellectually prodigious masterpiece. It’s a classic Schrader slow burn that seems to reach, in its final moments, for the impossible. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleMarc SavlovMay 23, 2018
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 to date. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleMay 23, 2018
First Reformed has a confidence about it, the presence of filmmaking consciousness that can’t do wrong, because this time he knows exactly what he wants to say, not only in a general sense, but second by second and shot by shot. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comGodfrey CheshireMay 18, 2018
A stunning, enrapturing film, a crowning work by one of the American cinema’s most essential artists. Read full review
100
The Seattle TimesJ.R. KinnardMay 17, 2018
Schrader dissects the roots, hypocrisies and virtues of Christianity through a series of increasingly troubling symbols.... Not an easy watch, but required viewing for ambitious cinephiles. Read full review
100
The New York TimesA.O. ScottMay 17, 2018
It is the portrait of a soul in torment, all the more powerful for being so rigorously conceived and meticulously executed. Read full review
100
Movie NationRoger MooreMay 16, 2018
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 acting of Ethan Hawke. Read full review
100
Village VoiceAlan ScherstuhlMay 16, 2018
The conflicts Schrader exposes are too pressing, too raw, too obvious in their own right to demand subtlety. That makes First Reformed a fascinating work of almost mixed media: Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson meet outraged editorial cartooning meet the it-always-builds-to-violence pulp sensibility of the movie brats. The mix is volatile, enraging, entrancing. Read full review
100
Slant MagazineGreg CwikMay 11, 2018
After more than 20 features, Paul Schrader has been reborn with First Reformed, an unhurried, furious, deeply agonized look at faith and skepticism that’s as reverent as it is blasphemous. Read full review
95
The AtlanticDavid SimsMay 21, 2018
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 that’s one of the most searing cinema experiences of the year. Read full review
91
IndieWireEric Kohn
The movie’s conclusion pits religion against personal desire in remarkably visceral terms. Read full review
90
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzMay 24, 2018
Paul Schrader’s First Reformed is an amazing examination of faith, a film that stays with you long after you have left the theater. Read full review
90
ScreenCrushE. Oliver WhitneyMay 17, 2018
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 to really soak it up, but even after a single viewing, it left me completely awestruck. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangMay 17, 2018
It is an exquisite piece of filmmaking and also a blunt, pulpy instrument, a despairing, fully sustained howl of a movie that is easily this director's finest work in years. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternMay 17, 2018
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 good, useful life in the turbulent here and the terrifying now. First Reformed has its steeple in the clouds and its foundation on solid ground. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekMay 17, 2018
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 practically etched into his forehead. Read full review
90
VarietyOwen Gleiberman
In First Reformed, Paul Schrader courts respectability and leaves it in the dust, getting stoned on excess. But make no mistake: He’s still one hell of a filmmaker. Read full review
88
Philadelphia Daily NewsGary ThompsonMay 31, 2018
A spare, meticulously crafted movie. Read full review
88
St. Louis Post-DispatchCalvin WilsonMay 31, 2018
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, Seyfried turns in a poignant and beautifully nuanced performance. Provocative and mesmerizing, First Reformed is a film that demands to be seen. Read full review
88
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)John SemleyMay 30, 2018
First Reformed may well be the ultimate auteur object for Schrader apostles. But ultimately its sheer archness reveals Paul Schrader as a gifted and deeply persuasive evangelist of the transcendental style – if not quite a canon saint. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsMay 24, 2018
An act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperMay 23, 2018
With First Reformed, Schrader delivers his most impactful work in years, with Ethan Hawke’s haunting and brilliant work as Ernst Toller joining the ranks of great lead performances in Schrader films. This is an inescapably memorable and at times almost unbearably sorrowful piece of work. Read full review
88
Rolling StonePeter TraversMay 17, 2018
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 very best – a cinematic whirlwind that leaves you both exhilarated and spent. Read full review
88
The Associated PressLindsey BahrMay 17, 2018
Harrowing, but with a wry humor, and utterly transporting, Paul Schrader has synthesized his complex religious upbringing with modern anxieties into a trenchant portrait of tormented souls in First Reformed. Read full review
85
Paste MagazineDom SinacolaMay 23, 2018
It’s a gorgeous film, mourning the impossibility of being alive as it celebrates that which binds us, a conscious-rattling, viscera-stirring piece of art. Read full review
85
TheWrapAlonso Duralde
Paul Schrader has always been a faith-based filmmaker in the truest and most challenging sense, and First Reformed is 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 fans, rejoice. Read full review
83
ConsequenceRandall ColburnMar 15, 2018
Hawke is too committed for Toller’s humanity to not shine through. It’s a layered, transformative performance, his gritting, introverted Toller bearing no traces of the rambling, loose-limbed Hawke of Richard Linklater’s canon. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubIgnatiy Vishnevetsky
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 Hawke giving one of his finest and most moving performances in the lead role. Read full review
83
The Film StageEthan Vestby
First Reformed...may be the full realization of Schrader’s vision. Read full review
83
The PlaylistRodrigo Perez
Full of conviction, First Reformed feels like a lifetime of preoccupations and traumas distilled beautifully, accompanied with a haunting sparseness creating a profound deliverance. Read full review
80
EmpireIan FreerJul 16, 2018
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 one of the performances of the year. Read full review
80
CineVueJohn Bleasdale
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. Read full review
80
Screen DailyTim Grierson
Thoughtful, moving, overreaching and uncompromising, First Reformed is a tremendously tormented work from writer-director Paul Schrader. Read full review
80
The TelegraphRobbie Collin
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 sharpened and unblinking seriousness, even when the going gets mesmerically weird. Read full review
75
UproxxVince ManciniMay 24, 2018
First Reformed is bleak and bone dry, a little self-indulgent, and it screams neither “fun” nor “production values.” It is the opposite of a “romp.” But damned if it doesn’t stay with you. Read full review
75
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyMay 18, 2018
First Reformed is a bleak, punishing movie and the furthest thing imaginable from an easy crowdpleaser. But Hawke juices it with an austere sense of grace. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinMay 16, 2018
First Reformed is rigorously austere (as befits the author of Transcendental Style in Film), but every frame suggests a longing for a world elsewhere. It could be argued that it gets away from Schrader, who probably had to wrest the script from his own hands to begin shooting. Read full review
70
The New YorkerAnthony LaneMay 14, 2018
Nobody, not even a hard-core Schrader fan, could claim that First Reformed makes for easy listening, or viewing. If anything, it outstrips its predecessors in severity. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthy
The movie's concerns are obvious, not subtle, and while intellectual energy abounds, laying in subtext, building underlying tension physical and creating visual dynamism are not Schrader's strong suits. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerMay 18, 2018
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 Priest.” But Bresson’s spare stylistics achieved a sublimity while Schrader’s, though intermittently powerful, too often feel schematic. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTom RussoJun 14, 2018
Hawke delivers a strong melancholy variation on his familiar emotional cool as Reverend Toller. Read full review
60
Time OutJoshua RothkopfMay 17, 2018
The plot takes a timely turn toward homegrown terrorism, and even as cinematographer Alexander Dynan amasses ominous clouds, the film’s break from head-bound matters is a tonic. Read full review
60
The GuardianXan Brooks
First Reformed is a deeply felt, deeply thought picture; impressive in its seriousness and often gripping in the way it frames itself as a debate and a sermon. Read full review
40
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottJun 14, 2018
Admittedly, I'm in the minority here, with many other critics swooning over First Reformed and the big questions it raises. Regardless, the biggest question I had after watching it was simple: What the hell did I just witness? Read full review
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