It's great screen acting, as [Vincent] Gallo expressively uses his body to make it part of the film's overall design.

| May 5, 2020

Essential Killing goes so far out of its way to avoid political commentary that the commentary that remains is slim, reduced to a familiar, though occasionally striking, statement on man's animal nature.

| Original Score: B- | May 5, 2020

The religious-themed inserts are incongruous in a project that so studiously sidesteps political markers and prove an unwanted distraction in the cinema.

| May 5, 2020

The violent perversity of some of the man's actions throws things off to an extent and, ultimately, [Jerzy] Skolimowski's bag of narrative tricks is not ample enough to fill out even the brief running time.

| May 5, 2020

Despite skillful assemblage, the script's plausibility issues increasingly undermine engagement, even with the generous argument that the pic is a parable and operates according to more poetic laws of realism.

| May 5, 2020

At times engrossing and not without palpable suspense, it nonetheless amounts to a provocative doodle.

| May 5, 2020

Vincent Gallo, who says not a single word in the film, invests the main character with deep-seated desperation in a performance that will win kudos.

| May 5, 2020

With "Essential Killing," [Jerzy] Skolimowski comes closer than ever before to a pure, elemental story.

| Original Score: 3/4 | May 5, 2020

Under the guise of current events, Skolimowski artfully conjures an elemental archetype of human life itself. In English, Polish, and Arabic.

| May 2, 2011

Essential Killing would be much less powerful if it didn't show the jihadi's physical sufferings with such visceral immediacy, and if the realism weren't strong enough to deliver surrealist shocks like the staggering final image.

| Apr 5, 2011

Essential Killing is something of a comeback, if a relatively minor one.

| Apr 4, 2011

The film's nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. Gallo starts as an extremist nutjob, killing for his beliefs - but turns into a hungry maniac, killing to stay on the run. Does the film draw a fascinating comparison between the two? No.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 3, 2011

The minimalism feels a bit affected, but as a near-abstract rumination on war and survival, it has a certain stark potency.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 2, 2011

It could almost have been made as a silent movie, which is a credit both to Gallo's performance and Skolimowski's pared-down storytelling.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2011

The stark, propulsive filmmaking and Gallo's impressively committed performance must be judged against the evasiveness of its maker's motivations.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2011

Stripped of its political vestments, Essential Killing is a chase film almost existential in its rawness and virtually silent in its unfolding -- just a pursued man reduced by circumstance to a primitive state.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 1, 2011

[A] wondrous-looking, dreamily bloody, often wordless drama.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 1, 2011

Essential Killing is intriguing and disturbing, made with tremendous confidence and conviction.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 31, 2011

This is bold filmmaking that nevertheless fails to become more than that sum of its parts.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 31, 2011

View it as an existential thriller illustrating how violence begets violence.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 30, 2011