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 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 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 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

An alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) harrowing and hallucinatory story of an OB-GYN who discovers that her every attempt at nurturing life leads only to more death.

| Feb 2, 2025

It is a disorienting, all-consuming sensorial experience and made all the much better to those willing to surrender to its mysteries.

| Jan 28, 2025

April’s frames seek to embody a dizzying span of human experience, even if Dea Kulumbegashvili occasionally strains to corral it.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 29, 2024

Kulumbegashvili leaves us wondering if the only solution for all of us is to completely return to nature.

| Sep 11, 2024

There is so much rugged poetry contained in this film, and yet the palpable, gnawing horror is what sees it through.

| Original Score: A- | Sep 7, 2024

An uncompromising, intensely felt panorama of female identities, agencies and desires under attack, April manages to be both a work of controlled formal rigor and unleashed, often overwhelming human feeling.

| Sep 7, 2024

That month has never seemed crueller. The high arthouse influences are still detectable, but Kulumbegashvili has mastered and absorbed them and has an evolving film-language of her own.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 7, 2024

[Sukhitashvili’s] performance, with its clenched anxiety and brisk efficiency, is a marvel to watch, and anchors what by degrees starts to feel like a miraculous work.

| Sep 5, 2024

April is a formidable, defiantly esoteric work. It demands considerable investment from the audience, but does repay it.

| Sep 5, 2024