La Chimera
Neon | Release Date: March 29, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 31 Critic Reviews
Positive:
30
Mixed:
1
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeMay 13, 2024
There’s something about the folkloric quality of Rohrwacher’s films, their embrace of a kind of earth magic, that prompts people to describe them as fairytales. But this is perhaps misleading. La Chimera is no twinkly escapist fantasy, it’s a film full of grit, thorns and greed. Read full review
100
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyMay 11, 2024
There’s something to this film, and to director Alice Rohrwacher’s work at large, that feels as delicate, as enigmatic, and as spiritually charged as these millennia-old artefacts. It stirs up a fierce protectiveness in the viewer. Treasure this now, hold it, turn it, and examine it from all sides, or it may slip beyond your grasp. Read full review
100
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesApr 4, 2024
Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher’s fourth narrative feature – a soft kiss of magical realism here, a Keystone Cops caper there – is dreamily disorienting. Read full review
100
Rolling StoneDavid FearApr 1, 2024
Even while the director is displaying her knack for cine-magic tricks and formalist gestures, she’s also well aware that she blessed with someone at the center of this carousel who needs no illusionist’s help. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesCarlos AguilarMar 29, 2024
As with Rohrwacher’s previous movies, there is an exquisite blurring between the tangible and the ethereal, the urban and the pastoral, life and death, past and present — all of it overlapping with the same ease as the hues of a twilight sky. Read full review
100
The New YorkerJustin ChangMar 29, 2024
At the heart of La Chimera is the question of how we bear the weight of the past while living in the present, and the answer that Rohrwacher settles on strikes me as both sensible and hopeful: we must, to the best that we can, eradicate any meaningful difference between the two. Read full review
100
The Associated PressJake CoyleMar 27, 2024
When we talk about “movie magic,” the first thing that comes to mind is often something like the bikes achieving liftoff in “E.T.” But it applies no less to Alice Rohrwacher’s wondrous “La Chimera,” a grubbily transcendent folk tale of a film that finds its enchantment buried in the ground. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 26, 2023
La Chimera is a film that utterly occupies its own fictional space; it expresses its eccentric romance in its own fluent movie dialect. I was utterly captivated by this sad, lovelorn adventure. Read full review
95
TheWrapTomris LafflyMay 26, 2023
La Chimera is a pictorial delight to luxuriate in, as it is a philosophical wonder on the unknowability of time. The earth belongs to the past and the future, this miracle of a film quietly suggests. We just live in it. Read full review
91
The PlaylistFarah ChededMay 29, 2023
As with her other works, La Chimera is a gift of a film, a philosophically stimulating piece of cinema that has the rare capacity to genuinely transform the way we look at the world. Read full review
90
Little White LiesEsmé HoldenMay 9, 2024
Rohrwacher instead makes connections through something more primal than logic, a flow of images that feels surprising but always intuitive, in the way a dream does. Read full review
90
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriMar 29, 2024
At times, it feels as though it has emerged — dusty, tattered, and beautiful — from the storied earth of Italy itself. Read full review
90
Screen RantAlex HarrisonMar 29, 2024
The movie is so interested in archeology (the credits dedicate it "to all archeologists, custodians of every end") that it becomes an analogue for the viewing experience. Rohrwacher asks us to interpret La Chimera the way archaeologists interpret fragments of the past. Read full review
90
TimeStephanie ZacharekMar 29, 2024
Alice Rohrwacher's enigmatic and bracing La Chimera, its touch as glancing as a zephyr, asks more of us while demanding less. It’s the kind of movie you wake up from, as opposed to one you merely watch. Read full review
90
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesMar 28, 2024
The past can be fetishized, commodified, dreamed of, but it can never fully be returned to—a stubborn impossibility that “La Chimera” dramatizes with playful, peculiar grace. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisMar 28, 2024
Rohrwacher’s digressive storytelling can make La Chimera seem unstructured, but she’s going where she wants to go and at her own pace. She likes detours, lived-in (nonplastic) faces and the kind of revelatory details that might go unnoticed, if she didn’t direct your gaze at them. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyMay 27, 2023
Rohrwacher makes movies you sink into rather than watch dispassionately, taking time to establish the milieu as her characters and stories reveal themselves in layers. Read full review
90
VarietyGuy LodgeMay 26, 2023
[Rohrwacher] offers all her earthly and otherworldly preoccupations in scattered, bejeweled fragments, for us to gather and assemble and interpret — and doesn’t much mind if some pieces stay buried. Read full review
88
Washington PostTy BurrApr 12, 2024
Wise, funny and mysterious, it’s a one-of-a-kind charmer. Read full review
88
ObserverLaura BabiakOct 10, 2023
Rohrwacher’s storytelling is inviting, unique and engrossing; every moment pulses with life and history, and it’s easy to get sucked into a world that’s just slightly different from our own. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineJake ColeSep 8, 2023
In this rueful film about all things unseen, the importance of time is seemingly felt by everyone. Read full review
85
The AtlanticDavid SimsApr 12, 2024
I’d forgive anyone for thinking this all sounds a little too precious, but that’s Rohrwacher’s storytelling skill: She can make such a fairy tale feel familiar without sapping it of its dreamlike charm. Read full review
85
The Daily BeastNick SchagerMar 27, 2024
Composed to seem at once off-the-cuff and mannered (replete with varying film stocks), La Chimera blends sweetness, sorrow and silliness with a lyrical touch. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubMatt SchimkowitzMar 29, 2024
La Chimera is a formal delight that holds no shortage of surprises. It calls for further viewings, asking us to unearth the mysteries buried long ago. Read full review
83
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 26, 2023
O’Connor’s exquisite performance seems to channel Harry Dean Stanton’s haunted turn in “Paris, Texas”; less wraith-like in its physicality, but similarly intangible, like a man being played by his own shadow. Read full review
80
EmpireLaura VenningMay 11, 2024
Enigmatic, absorbing and so much more alive than any pottery behind glass in a museum, this is an exquisitely crafted, grown-up Indiana Jones steeped in its own distinctive magic. Read full review
80
Time OutSophie Monks KaufmanMay 30, 2023
Rohrwacher weaves this thread in and out of the more grounded storylines with the most exquisite even-handedness, evoking Greek mythology while creating her own legend. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyMay 26, 2023
The further down the film descends, the more transfixing its images tend to get, as if Rohrwacher and Louvart have teamed up on an archaeological dig for their own treasures of texture and light. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireMar 29, 2024
After deftly navigating a variety of tones, Rorhwacher places O’Connor’s Arthur at the center of a moment that’s truly surprising, and surprisingly poignant. In the process, with this film that feels suspended in time, she proves once again that she’s one of the most singular and artful filmmakers working today. Read full review
67
The Film StageRory O'ConnorJun 7, 2023
No director of her genius would ever really make a bad film––if such a thing even exists––but we can be wary of a change in sensibilities here. Lazzaro‘s transcendental moments felt earned because his world was coarser to the touch. With Le Pupille and La Chimera, Rohrwacher is moving towards a cinema of fewer rough edges, and a poorer one for it. Read full review
58
Paste MagazineBrianna ZiglerOct 10, 2023
The dreaminess, a clear evocation of Fellini, feels well-worn and contrived instead of exciting, coasting on aesthetics. Read full review
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