Tesla contains notable storytelling and performances in its imaginative liberties, but this history lesson still fails at electrifying its audience.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 28, 2024

So, is Tesla a bad movie? No, you can certainly do worse. Plus, accomplished actors Hawke and MacLachlan carry it across the mediocre finish line. Is it a good movie, though? Definitely not.

| Original Score: C+ | Feb 20, 2024

The film rarely finds the will to be interested in the man Tesla actually was. Coupled with its incoherent – if striking – aesthetic, this means Tesla too often feels like an empty frame, or a motor without the power to keep it running.

| Jul 19, 2023

Almereyda’s wildly creative Nikola Tesla biopic...defies conventions...

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 23, 2022

With its time almost up, Tesla suddenly snaps into sharp emotional focus, and the subsequent epilogue clarified this often-mysterious movie’s agenda—as an emotional way to process aging, failure, missed opportunities and death, much more my speed...

| Dec 1, 2022

if you are looking for a film that explores Tesla’s drive and the meaning of his existence to today’s modern world, and the absurdity of it all, Tesla is the film for you.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

“Tesla” finally gives the Serbian-born visionary the big screen treatment, offering him more than than a brief cameo or a thinly sketched supporting role.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 25, 2022

It’s possible that, like the innovator himself, Tesla is ahead of its time and will be more appreciated in years to come. More likely, though, is that the film is just a fascinating misfire.

| Original Score: 4/10 | May 20, 2022

A work of Brechtian filmmaking that feels less like Tesla's dramatized life story than an essay about how visionaries must contend with the demands of capitalism, Tesla presents a dazzlingly unconventional biopic.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 18, 2022

Hawke's presence is the only thing that keeps it minimally lit between so many blinks. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 18, 2021

Michael Almereyda's sweetly bonkers mixtape of a film tribute is pure connoisseur delight. And, frankly, eerily accurate.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 31, 2021

The director's approach seems unusual, but well-suited to its inventive topic.

| Jul 19, 2021

Tesla offers limited critical purchase or significance beyond highlighting an underappreciated individual intelligence.

| Jun 5, 2021

Not so much a biography as an extended legal battle. This may have been accurate to Tesla's life, but director Almereyda leaves it on the floor as scraps of boring red tape.

| Mar 30, 2021

...an irreverent biopic that's less concerned with the when-and-how than speculating about the why...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 17, 2021

Tesla refuses to be a straight down the line, traditional historical portrait, and rather an avant garde, often wilfully navel-gazing depiction of lost greatness.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 14, 2021

I'll stick with David Bowie in The Prestige, thanks.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 11, 2021

But the oddities, annoying gimmicks and quirkiness are largely a way of avoiding the problem of what American capitalism was becoming and has become.

| Feb 10, 2021

The movie aims high, and is almost as idiosyncratic as the man it portrays.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 29, 2021

... [T]he balance may tip a bit less to the successful side, but I admire Almereyda ...

| Jan 27, 2021