Engaging enough for the duration but muddled and ill-conceived.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 8, 2016

The nonprofessional actors deliver stirring performances and Audiard never sentimentalizes the characters' situation. And despite the film's misguided climax, Audiard again demonstrates that he is one of the top filmmakers working today.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 23, 2016

The film simmers and builds until it boils over in an explosive climax. And it shows how far people will go just to be able to cling to some semblance of hope.

| Original Score: A- | Jun 17, 2016

Shooting on actual locations and with a cast of nonprofessional actors, writer-director Jacques Audiard keeps the neorealism pumping until a third act concession to conventionality (and vigilantism) leads it in the direction of Cannon Pictures.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 10, 2016

A Jacques Audiard movie looks deceptively naturalistic, but it's as tightly coiled as a thriller and it hides allegories. Despite a controversial left-hand turn in the final moments, "Dheepan" is no exception.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 9, 2016

Like the best fiction, it takes the most incomprehensible stories of our time and makes them hauntingly, inescapably clear.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 9, 2016

For three-quarters of its running time, "Dheepan" feels like something special.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 2, 2016

It burrows into the hearts and minds of human beings trying to find a world in which it's possible to have a life worth living.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 1, 2016

A story of survival, of assimilation - and of alienation.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 27, 2016

Further cements Audiard as a singular chronicler of roiling souls desperately navigating a way out of circumstances that threaten to upend them entirely.

| May 18, 2016

It is not unusual, after viewing one of Jacques Audiard's films, to come away with a sensation of having observed true intimacy in an authentic world.

| May 13, 2016

Complicated lives get tough yet compassionate treatment in Dheepan.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 13, 2016

For a while, it's quietly meditative and riveting - worthy of the Palme d'Or it captured last spring in Cannes.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 13, 2016

Scene by scene, there's a leanness and economy to Audiard's filmmaking that gradually shifts, via dreamlike ellipses and temporal blurs, into a poetically heightened register.

| May 12, 2016

A compelling drama that might have worked even better without the action-thriller shadings. The unknown actors are pitch-perfect.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 12, 2016

As a narrative of immigrant life, "Dheepan" moves swiftly, with intriguing twists and turns.

| May 12, 2016

A tough, uncompromising picture, with a climax that really goes to work on you.

| May 9, 2016

Dheepan, for all its flaws, is hard-hitting in ways that count. It has the intimacy of a personal drama but the amplitude of a much larger immigrant odyssey.

| Original Score: B+ | May 6, 2016

It's simply that Dheepan's cultural clashes are richer than its man-vs-thug ones.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 6, 2016

"Dheepan" is finely-drawn, beautifully shot and acted, featuring complex characters doing their best in no-win situations.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 6, 2016