Timothee Chalamet gives a fully committed performance that manages to capture the interiority of Bob Dylan – his talent, his prickliness, his distance from people, and his quiet ambition.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 19, 2025

The people who made this movie plainly love Bob Dylan, but they allow the Bob Dylan who comes through to be who Bob Dylan is: insecure, overly confident -- all kinds of things.

| Feb 11, 2025

Dylan’s greatest hits have always been heirlooms: somehow just there. Amid the recreated past, the movie restores a sense of how seismic they would originally have been... New ears and life-long fans may both relish the raw novelty. 

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2025

Chalamet gets in his performance the arrogance, the narcissism, the studied cool...

| Jan 31, 2025

[A Complete Unknown is] five stars of pure entertainment underpinned by a 10-star performance by Timothee Chalamet...

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 24, 2025

I think Mangold knows what he’s doing, abandoning the pretence of realism the way Dylan abandoned the small pond of folk music, thus letting us see the film as a parable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 23, 2025

It’s a remarkable performance. Star of the moment Timothée Chalamet inhabits the loose-limbed, live-wire physicality of the young Bob Dylan and makes an impressively good fist of capturing the frayed hessian of his distinctive voice.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 21, 2025

Chalamet remains a highlight of the film. He bears an impressive physical resemblance to early 60s Dylan, and he’s nailed the slightly nasal gruffness of the singing voice.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 17, 2025

It’s captivating, even if you could argue that it’s dramatically underpowered. The events building up to Newport are listless in nature, but it has a seductive, meditative, cumulative power. I wasn’t bored for a single second.

| Jan 16, 2025

If you can endure Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (a version of the late Suze Rotolo) watching Dylan sing It Ain’t Me Babe with Baez and weepily realise that, yes, it ain’t Sylvie, babe, then you can also endure the rest of the Walk Hard clunkiness.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 16, 2025

Edward Norton is astonishing as Seeger, who gave Dylan a lot of early breaks and is painted as something of a father figure. He is the only actor whose soul you feel, in those kind but slightly wincey, paternal-but-rather-conflicted eyes.

| Jan 15, 2025

On rewatch, some of the usual biopic sins are [still] there... but it was also clearer that the film is consciously constructed around a central question, which, in Dylan’s case, is ‘the’ central question.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 12, 2025

A Complete Unknown offers solid renditions of iconic music, but it ultimately plays it too safe in its depiction of a daring artist.

| Jan 10, 2025

A film that, despite the magnitude of its undertaking, is accessible and exciting, but never tries to idolize an artist who is presented both at the height of his genius and his most egocentric, contradictory and even unpleasant. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jan 10, 2025

Problem is, it’s an intentionally opaque characterization, in a film overcrammed with musical performances – onstage, in the studio, on the bed noodling on a new song – which basically means half the movie is like watching pretty good karaoke.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jan 7, 2025

“A Complete Unknown” isn’t a complete success, but it does have musical moments that soar and performances to match.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 6, 2025

Even as it builds a realistic world with sweep and detail... it doesn’t try to make Bob palatable, nice or, finally, comprehensible in the usual dreary biopic fashion.

| Jan 3, 2025

... A maddeningly enjoyable piece of pop cinema.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 3, 2025

So many things could have gone wrong with a Bob Dylan biopic that it's a small miracle that James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown" is not just watchable but actually slyly observant and surprisingly compelling.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 30, 2024

A Complete Unknown is utterly fascinating, capturing a moment in time when songs had weight, when they could move the culture -- even if the singer who made them was as puzzling as a rolling stone.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 28, 2024