It’s like someone dropped Willem Dafoe in the middle of an antique shop with a baseball bat and said, “Go to town!” And that he does.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 4, 2023

The film has exhausted both the premise and its leading man’s capabilities, while the audience has grown tired of pondering whatever themes it purports to examine. It’s time to part ways, and yet the images keep flickering and the film keeps going.

| Mar 25, 2023

"Inside" pits the most primal elements of humanity against the most advanced in order to tease out the contradictory and alienating nature of our current world.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 21, 2023

Inside is a perplexing descent into the unknown, and whether or not this madness is art (or the art is madness) is purely in the eye of the beholder.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 21, 2023

William Dafoe’s unique face and morally ambiguous stance make him an exceptional portrayer of unhinged psychological screen wackos, but the absence of any character revelation or plot development robs Inside of any remotely sustainable interest.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 20, 2023

As a movie, Inside is utterly bloodless — an exercise in eking out an existence in improbable circumstances that just feels like a chore.

| Mar 18, 2023

Willem Dafoe can make even the most peculiar or morally ambiguous character a fascinating watch, but the simplicity of this high-concept psychological thriller also means that it can sometimes be a bit of an endurance test.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2023

This is the kind of wild, let-it-all-hang-out work we know going in that Dafoe is capable of pulling off, and as a result, his descent into savagery has a whiff of the familiar to it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 17, 2023

Life, in the hands of Dafoe, is an agonized game. For Katsoupis, regrettably, agony wins the day.

| Mar 17, 2023

As a showcase for the inimitable Dafoe it has its minor freaky-deaky pleasures. Ultimately, though, it goes nowhere—literally and figuratively.

| Mar 17, 2023

It's a guided tour into the recesses of the human psyche.

| Original Score: B | Mar 16, 2023

What is clear is that great actors can do a lot to sell an ingenious idea that ends up being both its distinguishing factor and its own worst enemy.

| Mar 16, 2023

When boredom sets in, we’re offered the silence to contemplate our own definition of art as Nemo the criminal evolves into Nemo the creator.

| Original Score: B- | Mar 16, 2023

Inside has all the surface trappings of an arthouse hit, but don’t look too closely – there isn’t much there.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 16, 2023

Inside rests on the shoulders of Dafoe.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 15, 2023

Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 14, 2023

[Dafoe] can’t quite save “Inside,” but he does make you believe Nemo is worth saving.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 14, 2023

It’s all Dafoe, all the time — basically a one-man show, with the exception of some brief dream sequences — and he is customarily all in on his performance.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 13, 2023

In addition to the crimes against the audience, the movie shows an exotic fish getting suffocated, and a pigeon being maimed.

| Original Score: 0/4 | Mar 13, 2023

Dafoe is captivating as always, but not even his slinking, slippery presence can save the film from turning into a rather torturous endurance test.

| Mar 6, 2023