There’s a sense of dread running through this deeply discomfiting – but gripping – character study.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 12, 2022

Sundown is both as mean as Franco’s reputation suggests and as compelling.

| Apr 13, 2022

Franco may be making a point about the effects of disparity in wealth, but why base it on a narrative trick?

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 7, 2022

It's a lot, and at the same time it simply isn't enough.

| Original Score: C+ | Feb 3, 2022

Roth’s performance is utterly absorbing.

| Feb 3, 2022

"Sundown" is at its most engrossing as an individual portrait, even if its inscrutable subject is a person to whom virtually no (sane) viewer will relate.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 2, 2022

Whatever it's saying - and it's not clear that it's saying anything specific - it connects. It's not just another good movie. Somehow, it all adds up as something more important.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 31, 2022

A punishingly withholding drama... I found it to be handsome but frustrating at the same time.

| Jan 29, 2022

Quite a slow burn of a film, but I think one would do well to stick with it... as it reveals itself.

| Jan 29, 2022

Even as the movie takes a slight turn into surrealism in its final third, and becomes more overtly political as it steams towards its ending, the sum is slight and obscure.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 28, 2022

As a whole, the film lacks the courage of its own despair. The longer it goes on, the more Franco feels obliged to pack it with plot and context.

| Jan 28, 2022

[A] taut, confidently unsettling film.

| Jan 28, 2022

Through no fault of Mr. Roth's, his character isn't interesting enough to sustain our involvement in the story. Neil's detachment doesn't intrigue us, it only detaches us in our turn.

| Jan 28, 2022

What's extraordinary about Sundown is just how little it tells you, how little you get to know the characters, how little actually happens and yet how wholly captivating it is.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 27, 2022

Roth's delivery isn't the problem here; neither is the film's slow-burn pacing nor its absence of score. Rather, the script feels thin and ill-conceived in a film that clings noticeably to the surface.

| Jan 27, 2022

Sundown has more substance, and a more intriguing premise, than most of Franco's proudly sadistic work. But it still amounts to just a lot of artfully composed bleakness...

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 27, 2022

The film leaves the viewer with the impression of a man trying to beat the entropic decay that surrounds him to the punch.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 22, 2022

Franco's look at rich foreign interlopers on Mexico's famous beach is intriguing though not as scathing as it could be.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 27, 2021

A smart, engaging drama.

| Sep 21, 2021

Sundown doesn't subvert what we've come to expect from Franco's work, but it is still a distinctively cerebral rumination.

| Original Score: B | Sep 5, 2021