While it is certainly more like an endurance race than a stroll through the park, there is something redeeming in its cinematic beauty.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 15, 2017

While the craftsmanship is undeniable and the themes of spiritual belief, betrayal and redemption are laudable, the film feels flat and not as emotional or moving as it should be.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 2, 2017

Scorsese doesn't glorify martyrdom, and he doesn't even hate the killers. He makes death as blunt and dull and useless as a snapped pencil. The point is that there is no point.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 13, 2017

Alternately powerful and somnolent.

| Original Score: B | Jan 13, 2017

For those not exulted by the inner-workings of devotion, it's a slog.

| Original Score: C | Jan 13, 2017

Not all so-called passion projects are able to convey actual passion on screen. This one does. Silence feels like both an ardent reaffirmation of faith and a lonely cry out to God in the dark.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 12, 2017

This may not be Scorsese's best film, but it's unquestionably his most impassioned.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 12, 2017

Silence is Scorsese's most expansive historical canvas, but in the tightness with which it plots these torturing relationships that might lead to enlightenment it is his most hermetic, secretively enclosed.

| Jan 10, 2017

Scorsese's abiding passion and respect for his source material are everywhere in evidence. For once, perhaps, they are a little too great.

| Jan 7, 2017

Silence is a troubling, emotion-fueled enigma, and only through additional viewings do I believe an understanding of what it is Scorsese is attempting to say will ever be determined.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 6, 2017

Scorsese has been etching his beliefs onto celluloid for almost 50 years, and their meanings remain as evanescent, as mysterious, as ever. Silence is not a film to be solved, or resolved, but pondered. It's not a parable. It's a koan.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 6, 2017

This is a long and dull costume drama that seems to think a contemporary audience can picture faith as easily as it does a cassock, cross or kimono.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 6, 2017

This movie about silence is at its best in the verbal jousting on faith, culture, truth, and power.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 5, 2017

What beauty. What brutality. What madness.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 5, 2017

Silence requires a leap of faith in its own right. The film is both repetitive and thrilling; it is boring and exhilarating; it will test your patience and expand your mind. Silence is loud, in an astonishingly quiet way.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 5, 2017

The actors are steeped in the drama and mysticism of the moment, especially Garfield's stoic Rodrigues, who emerges as the central figure and also narrator of this journey into the unknown, both the physical and metaphysical.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 5, 2017

The film can be ponderous in its rumination and ambiguity, but few cinematic treatments of Christianity and sanctity have been as generous or as intellectually challenging as Silence.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 5, 2017

Silence is Martin Scorsese's film about Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan whose faith is sorely tested, just as your patience will be sorely tested too.

| Jan 5, 2017

Silence is Scorsese's mode of sharing the Holy Communion. To that, every cinephile will say, "Amen."

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 5, 2017

It sure takes [Scorsese] long enough to drive [his] point home - putting the film's audience through its own kind of torture - but the morale of his story is ultimately both tough and nuanced.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 5, 2017