Master Gardener is a morally murky work of art, but it leaves us no doubt about Schrader’s belief in the possibilities of forgiveness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

What sets Master Gardener apart is its overwhelming tenderness.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 24, 2024

This film simmers with the horticultural potential for violence, just as a seed waits for the right conditions to explode into a plant … But I found it strangely – touchingly – optimistic.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 21, 2024

Shrader's rigorous compositions, dense atmospheres, and the specific weight of his reflections are unusual within the abundantly conventional cinema produced in his country. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 6, 2024

A story of redemption. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 6, 2024

Less interested in a faith crisis, Schrader focuses on his protagonist's path toward discovering love and composes one of his most luminous films. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2024

Stoic, serious, even severe, this dramatic thriller continues Paul Schrader's 'God's Lonely Man' trilogy. Using the metaphor of gardening - how it calms and mind & mends the soul - it profiles a tormented man in turmoil. Too much angst, too little payoff.

| Original Score: 6/10 | May 19, 2024

Master Gardener needed more time for these characters to grow, or it needed a writer interested in his Black characters as more than just signposts towards humanizing monsters.

| Original Score: D+ | Feb 28, 2024

Paul Schrader – still powering at the age of 77 – is at his uncompromising best here, taking his story onto intense and unexpected turf, while never losing sight of the essential optimism (slightly rare for the director) that lies at its core.

| Original Score: 18.5/20 | Dec 13, 2023

Neither the filmmaker nor the lead actor is afraid to take on difficult or contentious subjects, and the governing garden motif has promise, but it turns out to be stilted and awkward drama

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 13, 2023

This is very familiar territory for Schrader who traverses it proficiently though without enough panache to really make it anything more than a passing crime drama. It’s a bit of a letdown after The Card Counter.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 8, 2023

This buttoned-up, stringent melodrama is a beguiling riff on a narrative form that Schrader continues to tweak and pull apart to such interesting ends.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2023

As a horticulturalist with a pervasive past in film-maker Paul Schrader’s lesson in ethics, Joel Edgerton is so reined-in his every breath seems considered.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 7, 2023

Show this movie some patience, and it will show some rewards in return.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 6, 2023

Even if Gardener feels ever-so-slightly like the least of the three films, it’s still distinctively Schrader: engrossing, shrewdly written, smartly acted, unsettling in tone and equal parts draconian and beautiful visually.

| Nov 28, 2023

What could have been a kitschy, insensitive work blossoms into a treatise on how gentle the harshness of life can be.

| Original Score: 8.7/10 | Oct 29, 2023

A finely tuned thriller, it creates on me a feeling of tension and keeps me glued to my seat as Schrader, with a high pulse, narrates the path of redemption of an antihero played solidly by Joel Edgerton. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 18, 2023

We’re left with an unsatisfyingly weird love story that catches the eye but somehow doesn’t quite make emotional sense, much like Mrs Haverhill’s fantastic but distracting jellyfish wallpaper.

| Sep 21, 2023

Like many of Schrader’s works it will divide audiences – for those who have enjoyed the late era of the director’s filmography Master Gardener delivers what has come to be expected. Nihilism, optimism, romance – a strange and heady combination.

| Sep 6, 2023

As a character piece, Schrader has already done this much better before: despite Edgerton's perfectly calibrated performance, Narvel Roth is no Travis Bickle.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 6, 2023