Atlantics is rooted in the dangerous realities of migration, but it's also a movie about the smudgy space between life and death, and the irresistible pull of young love.

| Aug 1, 2024

The film is as aesthetically beautiful as it is a visionary social commentary.

| Mar 11, 2020

I really enjoyed trying to puzzle through this and I was very impressed by the tonal balance that Mati Diop pulls off here.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 24, 2020

This is a really cool like ghost story and love story and [a] social piece and all rolled into one in a very assured and fascinating movie.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 24, 2020

[It] deftly melds fantasy and romance in a complex portrait of migration.

| Dec 23, 2019

Atlantics is not merely social realism. It is far richer, and far stranger, than that.

| Dec 20, 2019

[Atlantics] can occasionally feel stretched and thin in certain spots, like a cracking medium-length film padded out to feature runtime. Still, that's no matter, because the film's real coup is the victory it scores for greater perspective.

| Dec 20, 2019

At its best, this film will haunt you with a chilling paranormal reframing of a global crisis that is completely disarming and yet still enchanting.

| Dec 20, 2019

Atlantics stuns and surprises.

| Dec 10, 2019

Stunning, capturing the migrant story and its effects in a new light.

| Dec 6, 2019

[Diop] has woven all these concerns and more into a bewitching and masterful film unlike any you've ever seen.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 4, 2019

Yet the film is so convinced of its seriousness and artistic prowess (gorgeous, long and inherently disturbing shots of the ocean abound) that it becomes mildly, and pleasingly, intoxicating.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 3, 2019

...a movie that works to keep its audience suspended vertiginously between states of focus and drift, of realism and fantasy, of confusion and understanding.

| Dec 3, 2019

But it's in the film's exploration of desire that it really sings, and begins to acquire magical realist qualities, as if human desire has the power to push everyday existence into something extraordinary and dangerous

| Dec 2, 2019

The French-African director practically invents a new genre - Senegalese gothic - and does it with such insouciance that all you can do is rub your eyes. It's so beautiful.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 2, 2019

It's silkily enigmatic and unpredictable, and certainly unlike anything else you will see this year.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 1, 2019

A luminously punky slice of Senegalese gothic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2019

In this haunting social lament Mati Diop pulls off shifts from social realism to genre mysticism with a poise as supernatural as the force that overtakes her young lovers.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2019

A tonal balancing act, perfectly executed. An absolute peach of a debut feature.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 27, 2019

The cinematographer Claire Mathon has form when it comes to making water a character in its own right.

| Nov 21, 2019