It's a formally audacious work whose stunning visuals are given that much more life by its stellar sound design.

| May 14, 2025

Not quite a thriller and not quite a horror movie, “April” is all the more haunting for never pinning down the roots of Nina’s retreat from life while dedicating herself to improving the lives of others.

| May 5, 2025

It’s not unusual to say that something cuts through the silence but in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April it’s the silence that cuts through us.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 5, 2025

It’s such a bravura display of filmmaking that you’ll keep your eyes on the screen even when you want to look away.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 1, 2025

This is only Kulumbegashvili's second feature-length movie, yet she imbues April with the imagery prowess of a seasoned pro.

| Apr 30, 2025

You’re not waiting in a Kulumbegashvili film, you’re living on the cliff edge, and life there runs on its own clock.

| Apr 29, 2025

April represents a promising sophomore feature in a filmography that has great potential.

| Apr 29, 2025

It’s a serious approach that declines to show the audience the mother’s catharsis, a challenge to the idea that birth is always joy, and abortion always terror.

| Apr 28, 2025

April confirms Kulumbegashvili as among the most essential and uncompromising European filmmakers, extending the promise of her 2020 debut Beginning.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 28, 2025

By granting these medical interventions their proper duration and respect, Kulumbegashvili infuses them with an element of the sacred.

| Apr 28, 2025

You could easily imagine April screened in a gallery as video art: part of its brilliance is in the tension it maintains between storytelling and a hardcore commitment to the imagistic.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 25, 2025

April is overall equal parts disturbing and enthralling, arresting and miserable; a gorgeous slow-burn pressure cooker that culminates in a quiet condemnation of the powers complicit in women’s suffering while offering no catharsis.

| Original Score: 7.5/10 | Apr 25, 2025

“April” is as exquisite as it is excruciating: a film that will linger with you long afterward, but you’ll probably never want to watch it again.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 25, 2025

April is a powerfully quiet, moving examination of control and one woman's relationship to it.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 25, 2025

And through it all lies an impressive performance from Sukhitashvili. Between the demand of the long takes and the constant state of fight or flight uncertainty, we find ourselves mesmerized by every movement and expression.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Apr 25, 2025

“April” is easy to admire, but Kulumbegashvili’s use of art-film conventions can be wearyingly familiar, especially when the leisurely pace turns to a crawl.

| Apr 24, 2025

[T]he movie [is] more confounding than revelatory.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 24, 2025

This is a remarkable film, rich in its spareness, reminiscent at times of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin though creating a cinematic language all of its own.

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

Writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili uses a mix of naturalistic performances, deliberately challenging camerawork and freaky effects to create a dark, creepy tone.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 21, 2025

After just two films, Déa Kulumbegashvili is proving to be an auteur whose distinctive audiovisual language holds an indecipherable, subjective component.

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