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

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

The biopic is an impossible art. You either bore your audience or reduce your subject to a mere collection of ideas and symbols.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 25, 2020

It won't spark for everyone but I found it intriguing and unexpected.

| Sep 20, 2020

To watch Tesla the film is to admire its ambition while regretting its follies. Much like Tesla the man, perhaps?

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 18, 2020

It's definitely not for everyone, but I liked this so much more than just a by-the-numbers biopic.

| Sep 1, 2020

Someone as brilliant and creative as Tesla surely deserves a biopic that is not afraid to be unconventional or to swing for the fences, but in practice this just did not work for me at all.

| Sep 1, 2020

For all its midway-ness and compromises, "Tesla" remains a more audacious and more curiosity-sparking movie than almost all of the bio-pics that come from Hollywood studios.

| Aug 28, 2020

Almereyda structures the movie as a series of slow-moving scenes, almost tableaux. Even when he uses a mobile camera, things still feel static, but in a good way.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 24, 2020

Like its visionary hero, the quirky biopic Tesla is a noble failure.

| Original Score: C+ | Aug 24, 2020

Often surreal and ambitious, Almereyda's Tesla relegates its subject as a mystery, telling us little beyond the history books; yet as a biopic that rebels against expectations and the need for acceptance, is pitched perfectly to the man.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 22, 2020

For all its arch devices and anachronisms, including a wonderfully straight-faced, go-for-broke cover of a 1980s pop hit, the effect of Almereyda's "Tesla" is hypnotic.

| Aug 22, 2020

Tesla is a bit of a mess, but at least it's not another plodding biopic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 22, 2020

Jolts of creative whimsy electrify a delightfully oddball biopic...Amid the anachronisms and fourth-wall breaking, there's a great performance by Ethan Hawke as the futuristic visionary.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 22, 2020

"Tesla" never manages to ground itself, which makes its high wire act feel more like a live wire, sputtering out of control. Stay away.

| Original Score: D+ | Aug 21, 2020

The film's experimental nature makes it tougher to swallow than a conventional biopic, but also more interesting and rewarding to engage with.

| Aug 21, 2020

A film about electricity and light that never fully illuminates its main character.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 21, 2020

Listening closely, I could swear that I heard the whirr of a dynamo inside his cerebellum.

| Aug 21, 2020

There's an earnest kind of desperation, almost madness, to Hawke's version that feels worth exploring.

| Original Score: B- | Aug 21, 2020

Tesla remains wry yet humorless, emotionally shackled while intellectually unbound. Of course our present doesn't shock them, Almereyda posits. They dreamed it into existence.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 20, 2020

[A] bizarre, bewitching film.

| Aug 20, 2020