This haunting story of identity and the longing for family has achingly real performances, especially J. Smith-Cameron and John Leguizamo. The snowy setting in the final scenes is beautifully filmed and very fitting.

| Oct 12, 2021

The overwhelming screen charisma of Andrea Riseborough is just about strong enough to prevent this identity drama from derailing into art house obscurity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 12, 2018

Good performances and interesting, though undeveloped narrative ideas in this debut feature from writer-director Christina Choe.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 11, 2018

Smith-Cameron and Buscemi are both terrific, Buscemi for the fullness of his subtlety (so much going on in the looks and silences) and Smith-Cameron, for the depths of pain she can suggest, even when she plays a surface happiness.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 5, 2018

"Nancy" possesses an alert, tense sense of atmosphere, but it winds up being as glum and inert as the protagonist herself.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 28, 2018

[Christina Choe] evokes the pained compassion of Atom Egoyan at his finest, neither maudlin nor absurd, even when the material seems fantastical.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 28, 2018

Prepare yourself: it's not often that a movie presents us with a central character as unremittingly sad as this.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 22, 2018

The movie's narrowly dramatic technique, with its curtly informational scenes, is matched by the emotional overdetermination of the images.

| Jun 14, 2018

"Nancy" is an eccentric, pungent gift of a film about a woman without identity played by an actress without persona.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 14, 2018

Nancy is a grim piece of work, but Choe's empathy for her protagonist gives the film its distinctive texture - woebegone, with flickers of both hope and dread.

| Jun 8, 2018

Nancy exhibits a seriousness of purpose that's rare in American movies today.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 8, 2018

Rather than defaulting to either condemnation or absolution, "Nancy" instead holds out the fleeting possibility of love to someone who has never known it before - and asks why we should begrudge her the impulse to seize it.

| Jun 7, 2018

Nancy sets its title character up as a lost, lonely woman in an alienating world, then pushes the audience's sympathy for her as far as it can go.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 7, 2018

What's left is a strange, sour tale that's neither origin mystery nor journey of self-discovery, but a vexing gesture toward damage and delusion that never permits us to peek under its broken heroine's hood.

| Jun 7, 2018

Through it all, Riseborough remains the film's great engine. Her eyes speak both of possibility and trepidation - of someone at once taking in the world and deeply fearful of what might be next.

| Jun 6, 2018

Much like a play, it forces you to pay attention to the nuances of each of the actors' (very well-done) performances, to sit with the characters quietly as if in a sitting room too formal to do much else.

| Original Score: B+ | Jun 5, 2018

There's vanity in its boutique art-film brand of hopelessness, which derives from an unearned fetishizing of "keeping it real."

| Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 2, 2018

You'll come away knowing you've seen a master at work.

| Jan 29, 2018

Nancy has an intellectual savviness to its sadness that works, as it challenges viewers on their compassion and ability to recognize something within someone who is so lost.

| Jan 26, 2018

Instead of exploring her actions, and the people they affect, Nancy's restraint keeps the film closed-off and grim, as muddy gray as the life she's aching to ditch.

| Original Score: C- | Jan 23, 2018