Sweeney's complex tricky performance – mixed with the emotional stakes – makes this intriguing drama completely absorbing.

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

It’s a troubling, unsettling and beautifully made production, all the more notable for being a debut feature that rigidly adheres to the actual recording that the FBI men made on the day that a brave young woman lost her freedom.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 3, 2023

Reality is a bizarre blend of the gripping and the banal -- a film in which politeness is used as a weapon and guile is disguised as embarrassment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 29, 2023

Reality is undeniably compelling cinema, and it raises some implicit questions about what qualities we do and don’t value in public servants.

| Jun 8, 2023

It's a fascinating movie in many respects, even if it doesn't quite work.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 8, 2023

A stranger-than-fiction reminder of the precarious times in which we live, and of what happens when individuals challenge authorities less troubled by truth than retribution.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2023

By presenting testimony without editorializing, the film becomes a searing indictment of a country that routinely punishes low-level true believers while rewarding traitors and opportunists up the food chain for their treachery.

| Jun 3, 2023

Sweeney’s phenomenal performance of hidden guilt under pressure is the film’s secret weapon.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 2, 2023

It is a stark X-ray of state power both deeply tied to the present moment and the timeless dread of the knock at the door.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 2, 2023

While realism underpins this truly extraordinary production throughout, there remains plenty of suspense, drama and unbridled angst.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 2, 2023

... An art-house experiment that wants to attract all kinds of viewers, not just the usual (liberal) suspects.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 1, 2023

This feels like the first time [Sydney Sweeney]’s had to really step up and own a role that carries a film, and she ends up being the X factor that separates Reality from true-crime karaoke. Sweeney has finally got her serious-actor moment and delivered.

| Jun 1, 2023

It’s a true triumph of storytelling and performance and a reminder that films don’t need to be flashy or big to be great.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 1, 2023

Sattar’s deliberate spareness gives this an unnerving, eerie quality while Sweeney’s performance is truly phenomenal. She plays Winner’s mounting dread and anxiety in a way that’s so authentic it will possess you.

| Jun 1, 2023

The banality is chilling.

| Jun 1, 2023

Reality might have benefited from widening the play’s tight, almost-claustrophobic focus a little bit more for this medium, but what’s there remains stark and compelling, with Sweeney’s discomfort speaking volumes.

| May 30, 2023

Reality is, quite literally, the kind of movie where people just talk the whole time. But that’s precisely why it works.

| May 30, 2023

The film is at its most straightforwardly chilling in its reliance on the spoken word -- and its forensic skill in reading between the lines.

| May 30, 2023

A pungently atmospheric, beat-by-beat account of someone losing their freedom over the course of an hour and change...

| May 30, 2023

This tense, mesmerizingly paced drama unfolds with a steady drip of mundane moments that gather walloping force as the minutes tick by.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 30, 2023