Neighboring Sounds is a handsome, but lethargic tale of urban cacophony.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 18, 2024

A debut feature in which Filho, with a resonant aesthetic, builds a mosaic of diverse characters to interrogate, with a sociological magnifying glass, the problems that still hide like ghosts behind the walls of Brazilian society. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 4, 2023

It could be the best 'noises-off' movie since Bong Joonho's debut feature Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), which it in some ways resembles.

| Nov 3, 2020

It is a rare film that makes open-ended ambivalence so explosively gripping, but Filho pulls it off with great panache and even greater promise.

| Nov 3, 2020

It's a film where nothing can happen, but at the same time, everything happens.

| Feb 13, 2019

Filho places great emphasis on his film's sound design, carefully constructing a vibrant patchwork quilt of living, breathing characters... The results are often awe-inspiring.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 13, 2019

Rural and urban, property lines and blood feuds, family histories and petty battles . . . in a film that reframes Brazil as a place where blood is thicker and murkier than water, even in homes that seem so clean and white and safe.

| Dec 27, 2013

Entrancing but vaguely discomfiting.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 11, 2013

Empty, anxious and puzzling: Neighboring Sounds has an intriguing tone of half-seen unhappiness that never pays off either in black humour or the terror of modern existence.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jun 14, 2013

It's a remarkable, understated fable about social strata and urban paranoia, although its stretches of plotlessness may push patience at 124 minutes.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 8, 2013

One of the strongest feature debuts of the last decade ...

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 5, 2013

With each scene, Kleber Mendonça Filho adds layers of meaning to his characters and the neighbourhood, many that no doubt can only be properly appreciated by Brazilian audiences.

| Mar 24, 2013

A hugely impressive debut feature from Kleber Mendonça Filho.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2013

An absorbing and extremely promising film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2013

Has echoes of Michael Haneke as it explores the guilty secrets and bitter resentments lurking beneath the calm, respectable surface of a community in affluent Recife.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2013

It is too long and sometimes drags, but burrs into the memory through naturalistic acting and a real sense of the perils of Brazilian life.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 22, 2013

For those who don't mind that lingering, almost voyeuristic display of human behaviour, this confident and promising debut is a must-see.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 22, 2013

Violence feels just around the corner, and we're kept guessing where it might come from.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 21, 2013

Neighbouring Sounds is scary, funny, mischievous, intelligent, magisterial: a picture of man and woman as social animal in which the animal never lurks far beneath the social.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 21, 2013

Filho's use of space is masterful, as fine as Antonioni or Polanski, with long Steadicam tracks and crisp wide shots giving us a fine-grained rendering of the block's communal and private spaces.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 21, 2013