Apples is its own creation, becoming stranger and richer and sweeter as it progresses.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2024

We’re able to invest ourselves in Nikou’s world because we can so easily see ourselves in Servetalis’s character.

| Jul 7, 2022

What this surreal microcosm ends up conveying about the human experience extends past the frame and into viewers’ hearts and minds.

| Jul 1, 2022

It all sounds bizarre on paper. But Apples, the first feature from the director and co-writer Christos Nikou, unfolds with an understated deadpan wit that makes even its weirder touches seem plausible, even logical.

| Jul 1, 2022

“Apples” subtly delivers a complex existential journey with deep meaning.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 29, 2022

[Christos Nikou] has pulled off a neat little trick: He’s told a story that, for reasons that are more easily felt than explained, is hard to shake off.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 28, 2022

There's a melancholy restraint to it, along with a surrealism that is so bizarre that you can't help but laugh.

| Jun 25, 2022

Nikou blends subtle comedy and tragedy to create a quietly moving cinematic experience.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 24, 2022

Even if one considers “Apples” part of the so-called Greek Weird Wave, such a subtly thoughtful and soothing approach to probe at existential concerns, rather than being predictably cynical or violent, makes it stand out.

| Jun 23, 2022

Mr. Nikou exhibits both a colorful imagination and a deft hand as a director. His is a name to be remembered.

| Jun 23, 2022

The movie never manages to hit above a dim emotional pitch, and a final-act awakening lands with a shrug.

| Jun 23, 2022

What Nikou evokes, with a haunting prescience, is the air of a stunned world.

| Jun 17, 2022

There's something resonant and recognisable in its tale of literally learning how to live again in the wake of disorienting trauma.

| May 14, 2021

It's a deadpan tragicomedy that mixes the playful and the poignant in a manner as tasty as a spitter - the bittersweet apples treasured by cidermakers as the perfect fuel for fermentation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 9, 2021

Deep, yet funny.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 8, 2021

Apples suggests, with great pertinence, that pandemics create new normals and nothing is set in stone. That said, Nikou's career seems like something we can bank on.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 8, 2021

While occasionally too muted for its own good, Apples does benefit from not pushing its quirk factor too hard - that would only have set up a barrier between us and Servetalis's hollow detachment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 7, 2021

It's a tender but slight debut from Nikou, though certainly signals him as a filmmaker to keep an eye on.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 7, 2021

Apples is intriguingly deadpan and sometimes funny, though I couldn't help feeling that it is also contrived, and even a bit flippant in a middleweight-arthouse mode...

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 6, 2021

The question of what we might be when we can't remember who we are is made fresh once more. The answer, not so weirdly, is altogether moving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 5, 2021