Though director Bertrand Bonello's exacting vision of a Parisian terror plot is as stylised and tensely structured as a psychological thriller, the drama plays out with unnerving realism.

| Oct 9, 2017

Much like Bonello's previous film, "Yves Saint Laurent," "Nocturama" revels in pure experience. But the sum total of its gliding abstractions is a mite brainless.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 7, 2017

You're in for the most suspenseful film to hit town all year.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 7, 2017

The frivolity of the film's unexpressed political earnestness-Bonello's unwillingness to give voice to his or his characters' ideas-is matched by the emptiness of its aesthetic.

| Aug 28, 2017

Nocturama might best be seen as a surrealist thought experiment.

| Aug 16, 2017

Nocturama is a gut punch wrapped in a velvet glove; it's so intensely visceral and visually impressive that it short-circuits interpretation.

| Aug 14, 2017

It is at once damnable and debonair. It seduces as it repels.

| Aug 14, 2017

You may not think that a movie that asks you to understand terrorists is for you, but if you give Bonello 130 minutes of your time, he'll make you a believer.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 11, 2017

When the ruthless, faceless power of the state finally asserts itself, what is meant to be a shocking climax merits little more than a nod and a shrug.

| Aug 10, 2017

The film mesmerizes and alienates equally.

| Aug 8, 2017

Bertrand Bonello constructs a clear-eyed sense of how technology keeps getting closer and closer to replacing human consciousness.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 7, 2017

Bonello stages bravura cinema choreography with a chilling confidence to match this circle of youth who may be some kind of ultimate realisation of Guy Debord's Situationist revolution.

| Dec 16, 2016

If this is artistic self-indulgence, then please, please, let us have more.

| Original Score: A | Nov 15, 2016

Nocturama makes an intriguingly cinematic case for showing over telling. But as a depiction of how, and why, terrorists (or anarchists or whatever they are) can take down a city, it falls apart in the face of what happens in the real world.

| Oct 21, 2016

A disturbingly relevant snapshot of contemporary tensions.

| Oct 21, 2016

Nocturama is enthralling until the bitter end, but it's so hard to distill its purpose that you can't tell if the film is opaque or if it simply offers nothing to see.

| Original Score: B- | Oct 21, 2016

Throughout the film, the teenagers never discuss the exact motivation behind their attacks. In fact, they barely talk at all. Yet their deafening silence is revelatory in itself, speaking of a general, suffocating malaise in the Parisian air.

| Oct 21, 2016

Too crafty to ignore, but too obnoxious to embrace.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 9, 2016