Origin
Neon | Release Date: December 8, 2023 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
75
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
31
Mixed:
13
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Washington PostAnn HornadayJan 17, 2024
Origin, Ava DuVernay’s audacious, ambitious adaptation of the equally audacious and ambitious book “Caste,” operates on so many levels at once that the effect is often dizzyingly disorienting. But hang in there: Viewers who allow themselves to be taken on this wide-ranging, occasionally digressive journey will emerge not just edified but emotionally wrung out and, somehow, cleansed. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comRobert DanielsDec 8, 2023
Rich in thought, Origin is a dense, forceful masterwork, and, quite simply, the most radical film of DuVernay’s career. Read full review
91
Original-CinKaren GordonJan 18, 2024
Led by a beautiful performance by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, writer-director Ava DuVernay’s fact-based Origin is a profoundly moving and humanistic movie that explores a range of complex issues about race and culture through the lens of a woman coping with loss and grief. Read full review
91
The PlaylistCarlos AguilarSep 6, 2023
DuVernay transcends the academic nature of the material via imaginative swings of fancy that immerse us in Wilkerson mournful mindset. Read full review
90
Film ThreatAlan NgJan 24, 2024
Origin is an important movie for this single reason: to make us rethink race in America. Read full review
90
The New YorkerRichard BrodyDec 7, 2023
DuVernay embraces Wilkerson’s work wholeheartedly and rises to the artistic challenge with one of the most unusual and ingenious of recent screenplays. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisDec 7, 2023
It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly. Read full review
90
VarietyPeter DebrugeSep 7, 2023
The film will get people thinking and talking. The way DuVernay directs it, Origin is a swirling tornado of ideas. Read full review
89
TheWrapTomris LafflySep 6, 2023
Origin is so rich, expansive and wildly varied that one could easily see how DuVernay could have turned it into a mini-series. How great that she instead chose a compact and coherent feature, with articulate editing, buttery cinematography (by Matthew J. Lloyd) across various visual palettes of different time periods, and opulent costume and production design. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJan 26, 2024
Origin offers the best of both worlds: a well-developed story with a three-dimensional lead character who grows over the course of the movie and an intellectually satisfying element folded into the screenplay. Read full review
88
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonJan 25, 2024
It’s not a fun time at the movies, but it’s an informative and worthy one. Read full review
88
ObserverEmily ZemlerJan 23, 2024
It would have been an obvious choice for Ava DuVernay to make a documentary out of Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. But the resulting drama, written and directed by DuVernay, is far more compelling, interrogating hugely complex concepts with consideration and surprisingly emotional gravity. Read full review
88
ABC NewsPeter TraversJan 19, 2024
How do you make a movie about an intellectual argument? By putting a human face on it, which is what filmmaker Ava DuVernay and acting force Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor do in this stunning provocation about race and class. The result is something rare: a movie that matters. Read full review
88
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 18, 2024
It is, I suppose, educational; it’s also vibrant and adroit and searching as human drama. Read full review
88
The Associated PressLindsey BahrJan 18, 2024
It is a powerful and artistic interpretation of an academic book that was anything but an obvious candidate for a narrative feature. Read full review
88
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJan 16, 2024
One of the most thought-provoking movies in recent years — the kind of film you’ll find impossible to forget, the kind of film you’ll want to discuss and debate with friends and colleagues. Read full review
80
EmpireStaff (Not Credited)Mar 4, 2024
DuVernay’s sweeping odyssey is an ambitious (if sometimes messy) spectacle. At its best, it holds a poignant power that provides plenty of food for thought — enough to linger long after the credits roll. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleDec 8, 2023
By the end, DuVernay has, with editor Spencer Averick’s fleet stitching, massaged her adaptation’s various threads into a collage of insight and emotion worth treasuring. Read full review
80
Time OutElizabeth WeitzmanDec 8, 2023
Wilkerson’s book offers a new way to look at age-old concepts. DuVernay’s film gives us a new way to process them. Read full review
80
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriSep 7, 2023
Origin has instances of raw domestic melodrama, but the emotions are so sincere that it’s hard not to be moved by it all. The film’s depiction of moments out of history is similarly textured. Read full review
80
BBCSteph GreenSep 7, 2023
Exploring this terrible framework, DuVernay's film unfolds with unpreaching clarity and fierce focus, full of heart and vibrant intent. Read full review
80
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 6, 2023
Origin works as a visual summation of Wilkerson’s ideas. But it’s also a movie about a woman striving to bring her ideas to the world, even in the midst of her own personal crisis. The life we plan and hope for is rarely the life we get. Origin is an exhortation to use every heartbeat wisely. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesJan 17, 2024
Origin doesn’t always get there, but the effort is exhilarating. It’s the contact high of an artist really going for it. Read full review
75
ObserverLaura BabiakJan 16, 2024
Plenty of movies are important, shining a light on underrepresented people and stories, but few are as revolutionary in scope, form, and purpose as Ava DuVernay’s uneven but powerful new film, Origin. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubCourtney HowardDec 8, 2023
For those who choose to take this riveting journey of discovery, they’ll find this picture gets them to a place of inspiring enlightenment and keeps them in that mindset far beyond the end credits scroll. Read full review
75
The Film StageSavina PetkovaSep 6, 2023
DuVernay’s dedication to rawness and realism puts literary and conceptual devices to good use to make an affecting, vital film for our times. Read full review
70
Paste MagazineSage DunlapJan 26, 2024
DuVernay has already documented history with projects like Selma and 13th, but Origin is her most daring feat yet. Read full review
70
Rolling StoneDavid FearJan 17, 2024
This is a movie that pays tribute to searching for conclusions rather than finding them once and for all, for thinking outside of categories and boxes in search of something more profound. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterLovia GyarkyeSep 7, 2023
We’ve seen the story of a woman searching for herself after tragedy many times before, but in Origin, DuVernay affectionately makes it her own. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreJan 17, 2024
Origin is noble, high-minded, moving and eye-opening. But as difficult as it was sure to be, shaping these themes, threads and characters into a movie, the film should have been sharper, tighter, poignant but more to the point. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineDerek SmithDec 4, 2023
Thanks to Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s unflappable performance, the theories that Isabel Wilkerson laid out in her book emerge with an emotional clarity that can be forceful, but the film’s often inelegant, choppy structure also works against that clarity. Read full review
60
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeMar 10, 2024
The compelling Ellis-Taylor goes some way towards tying together the disparate elements. She is a magnetic, dignified presence, persuasive in both the more melodramatic elements of the story and in the academic journey. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeMar 7, 2024
For all its flaws, however, Origin does have power as both didactic treatise and drama of recovery. There is something reassuring being said here about the restorative power of work. Read full review
60
Screen RantAlex HarrisonOct 9, 2023
I do not regret having seen it, and with all there is to recommend it, I feel comfortable suggesting you seek it out upon release. But do so with tempered expectations. Read full review
60
Total FilmJane CrowtherSep 7, 2023
DuVernay captures the universal experience of loss: the regrets, the suffocating sorrow. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 6, 2023
The result is a film with urgency and heartfelt sympathy, but one which I couldn’t help thinking may have been better served as a documentary to focus more directly on the issues involved. Read full review
58
ColliderRoss BonaimeSep 11, 2023
DuVernay took a big swing with Origin, and that’s certainly to be commended, but the film sadly doesn’t work more often than it does. The impact of the end makes the journey worthwhile, but it’s a rocky road to that conclusion. Read full review
57
PolygonOli WelshJan 18, 2024
The movie, which chronicles the personal tragedies of Wilkerson’s life as she conceives and researches the book, is an awkward hybrid of these two approaches, neither of which fully succeeds. It’s a drama that wants to be a documentary, and it’s at its best when it’s just reeling off Wilkerson’s fascinating ideas at full flow. Read full review
55
SlashfilmMarshall ShafferDec 7, 2023
Origin lacks both a center of gravity and a sense of scale. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJan 16, 2024
The movie starts to fray once we realize that DuVernay is not going to make a case for Wilkerson’s ideas. Rather, she plans to serve them up as undeniable truths. Read full review
50
Screen DailyJonathan RomneySep 7, 2023
This docudrama, recounting the background to Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 study ’Caste’, is an unwieldy, fragmented hybrid that comes across very much as an educational project, never quite gelling as narrative. Read full review
42
IndieWireLeila LatifSep 7, 2023
DuVernay’s film is unable to fuse melodrama and academia into a single narrative, even with such rich source material and as fascinating a subject as Isabel Wilkerson. The only possible conclusion it invites is every film critic’s least favorite sentence: Just read the book. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithJan 18, 2024
Even those who find Ms. Wilkerson’s thesis convincing are likely to concede that it is more at home in the library than at the multiplex. Many others will find Origin confusing and dry. Read full review
40
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Sarah-Tai BlackJan 18, 2024
While Ellis-Taylor is, as always, magnetic onscreen, Origin fails her talents, as well as both its characters and story, by reproducing the flaws of Wilkerson’s book with a stoic conviction. Read full review
20
The Daily BeastCaspar SalmonFeb 28, 2024
The film repeatedly oversimplifies Wilkerson's polemic, dumbing down the argument for an audience that may well start to feel patronized. Read full review
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