For De Roller, what matters is that he reach a state of relational equilibrium between every player...

| Jan 4, 2024

Albert Serra’s latest feature, Pacifiction, mesmerizingly blends thriller genre tropes with surrealism to put the audience into a dread-induced hypnotic trance.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 4, 2024

With a languorous pace and a run-time of nigh three hours, Albert Serra’s Pacifiction is a spellbinding, if daunting, experience. Set in Tahiti, the film follows High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel) through his quotidian duties.

| Jul 31, 2023

With an ethereal score, defiantly murky plot, hallucinatory cinematography, and some of humanity’s greatest horrors hanging over it like a pall, Pacifiction feels like a fever dream in the truest sense.

| Original Score: 75/100 | Jul 27, 2023

In a darkly humorous and stunningly gorgeous way, Pacifiction is about a man gradually becoming obsolete.

| Jun 30, 2023

Serra’s success in drawing us in — with intriguing characters and a humid, unnerving atmosphere — makes the final stages disappointing.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 1, 2023

I still can’t get it out of my mind. Or unsee its beautiful images.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 27, 2023

Serra’s film isn’t a comedy, however, but a political thriller simultaneously languid and chilling. The languor emanates from its haziness, a quality paradoxically enhanced by Artur Tort’s fly-on-the-wall widescreen cinematography.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 24, 2023

With its slow-burning build, it is an unsettling, atmospheric piece that has something of the unknowable quality of the central character, with his glassy diplomat’s smile and shark’s eyes, inscrutable behind his blue-lensed sunglasses.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 24, 2023

Whether or not the film has anything politically serious to say — and there is always the teasing suggestion that it might — Pacifiction is an intoxicating pleasure.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 20, 2023

Catalonian-born writer-director Albert Serra’s latest is a hazy fever dream of post colonialist politics and ambition that in its final minutes lurches into apocalyptic mania.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 18, 2023

[A]n atmospheric fever dream that takes aim at colonialism and politics as it weaves a thoughtful character study. Unfortunately, its excessive length erases a great deal of the bizarre tone, to the detriment of the film.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 18, 2023

Albert Serra's film starts from a premise worthy of being an espionage thriller but later dashes all expectation through digressions, redundancies, and blind alleyways. [Full review in Spanish]

| Apr 14, 2023

It mesmerizes as it raises issues of colonialism and exploitation. The title, given the locale and De Roller’s conundrum, is a devilish little play and a perfect accent on Serra’s carefully crafted vision.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 23, 2023

The films of sui generis Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra show how the powerful, or those who pretend to be, turn out to be as prone to human frailties as everyone else, if not more so.

| Mar 17, 2023

Very good and unsettling.

| Mar 15, 2023

The most fascinating moments here are to be found tucked away in the non-narrative-just-vibing feel of the film, and they feature the cryptic love interest/partner in crime/spy Shannah, a stunning first role for Pahoa Mahagafanau.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 13, 2023

A brilliant Polynesian Casablanca unfortunately buried beneath several layers of arthouse conceits, like crushingly long takes and unbroken, painfully slow dialogue. I wish there was a "producer's cut."

| Original Score: C | Mar 6, 2023

Seductive tropical political thriller.

| Original Score: B | Mar 5, 2023

“Pacifiction,” despite its unhurried editing, narrative miasma and generous 2 1/2-hour-plus running time, emerges as one of Serra’s more seductive efforts.

| Mar 2, 2023