One could teach a master class on this film, it is that rich. For anyone who loves art, literature, and film, "The Peasants" is a must-see.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 20, 2024

Shot as live action and then transferred to oil paint, the visuals don’t always feel essential to the narrative.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 7, 2024

The Welchmans’ visual style is eye-popping — how they did it is shown during the end credits — but to what end?

| Original Score: 1/4 | Feb 7, 2024

With its feel for both beauty and ugliness, the film transports us to this unfamiliar milieu with a richness rarely attempted in the cinema anymore.

| Jan 29, 2024

As tempting as it is, I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a gimmick, but the cumulative effect of paintings of live-action performances increasingly becomes a distracting one in Welchman and Kobiela’s latest effort.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 26, 2024

As the story’s melodrama grows repetitive, so do the visuals.

| Jan 25, 2024

There is some fun to be derived from supposedly maggoty peasants muttering rosaries against inclement weather while looking as if they’ve been styled for the Emmanuelle reboot. But not enough to justify a feature film, let alone all those paintings.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Dec 23, 2023

A classic Polish novel comes to oil-painted life in a disappointingly conventional animation.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 19, 2023

There's a lot of story in this film, but ultimately I just kept sitting back and wondering "Why is this an animated movie?"

| Dec 11, 2023

A disconcertingly beautiful picture about the ugliness of humanity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 10, 2023

... Traditional movie escapism never fully settles in; the Welchmans instead are continually reminding their audience that they are watching artifice, that the artifice is deliberate, and that it’s designed to provoke thought and engagement.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 8, 2023

There is visual interest here, but for me the drama isn’t sustained.

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

A film that impresses in its painstaking, years-long construction, without ever really supplying a reason (beyond prettiness) for such a laborious aesthetic.

| Oct 11, 2023

A ravishingly beautiful visual triumph.

| Sep 18, 2023

Bringing this 1,000-page novel to animated life in this way isn’t just an adaptation, it’s an illumination. It makes real the heightened reality that exists in your mind when reading a particularly captivating book.

| Original Score: A | Sep 15, 2023