It’s an exercise in hazy, wistful nostalgia — short on details and revelations, but an easy watch if you like New York stories.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2023

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel is a slightly rambling portrait of the very end of an era. An uneven film, it is nonetheless fascinating for the questions it raises and the thoughts it provokes.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 23, 2023

It’s a melancholy, dreamy study.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 20, 2023

The Belgian co-directors are more interested in preserving a sense of space than in rehearsing arguments about capitalist greed, the commodification of art and gentrification.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 20, 2023

The sense of a ghost story is self-evident. Like many examples of the form, the film sticks in the mind longer than you might expect.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 19, 2023

Dreaming Walls has its share of poignant moments, but for a documentary about a building, it rarely seems rooted to the ground.

| Nov 4, 2022

Don’t expect to get the fascinating history of New York City's famous Chelsea Hotel in the documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel. The movie is a rambling, disjointed look at some of the hotel’s current residents, who are mostly dull.

| Sep 5, 2022

The film presents a contemplative elegy for a hotel whose history is being eroded, but by focusing on the literal walls only further removes the voices of the very people who live (and dream) inside of them.

| Original Score: C+ | Aug 22, 2022

It’s intriguing and funny and sad and a little bit heartbreaking—but it’s also an important film for anyone who cares about New York City history, as well as a thoughtful counterpoint to more sensational narratives about this immortal landmark.

| Jul 18, 2022

This is a film more concerned with mood than hard answers, which makes for an immensely comforting viewing experience, even if one couldn’t help but desire more answers.

| Jul 18, 2022

In their own artful way, the filmmakers honor the hotel as a center of culture.

| Original Score: B- | Jul 18, 2022

A moving, devastating piece of filmmaking.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 17, 2022

Dreaming Walls is not encyclopedic and doesn’t want to be. But it gives a tantalizing taste of a grand old institution and the inevitability of change.

| Original Score: B | Jul 15, 2022

[Illuminates] the spirit of the Hotel Chelsea... honoring a place with artistry akin to someone who might’ve stayed there with the perspective to look beyond the brick and mortar to understand what makes a house a home.

| Jul 15, 2022

Duverdier and van Elmbt let the mythic past of the place haunt the edges of the film while focusing on the vibrant spirits of the here and now.

| Jul 15, 2022

It’s a ghost story haunted by fame and celebrity, but ultimately much more grounded and universal than that.

| Jul 15, 2022

The choppy editing denies the film a rhythm, making it a little stiff.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 15, 2022

With a filmmaking style that could be described as “wandering bohemian," this tedious documentary offers very little insight into the historic icon.

| Jul 13, 2022

It’s a poignant study of a creative hub that preserves in film what developers discard to the dumpster.

| Jul 13, 2022

...you’ll have had more than enough of these annoying holdouts talking over each other, mannered and maddening—rather like the film they’re in...

| Jul 12, 2022