Unsurprisingly, Orson Welles doesn’t efface his artistic personality for The Trial.

| Sep 20, 2023

What we basically end up with is an intriguing road to nowhere, one that has some interesting sights to see along the way, but which needed a little more substance to help make the journey worth it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 18, 2023

...among Welles' most brilliantly realized creations...

| Sep 14, 2023

What grubby filth! Josef K. (Anthony Perkins) is an office man, an ambitious junior bureaucrat, long and thin as a blade in knife-sharp suits... exacting haircut, encased in timeless tailoring, a trim suit... slim pants with pleats crisp as glass.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Mar 20, 2023

[A] singular two-hour experience, as dynamic and strange as anything Welles made.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 10, 2023

…deliberately uncomfortable by design…leans far closer to a unheralded masterpiece than a commercial disaster…

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 23, 2022

The material struggles to transport itself into a cinematic environment, but we’re taken on a journey in The Trial which is both a faithful portrayal and something new entirely.

| Nov 21, 2022

[A] fearless Kafka adaptation...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 18, 2022

Welles' direction is the perfect accomplice to the nightmare, creating one surreal scene after another.

| Feb 10, 2022

Welles thought it was one of his best, and he might be right.

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

It looks like a dream, although it doesn't feel like one. It is, unfortunately, a minor film in Welles' filmography. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jul 18, 2020

The Trial is a travesty of the original, and it substitutes nothing of its own; it is the emptiest, the most boring and pretentious film Welles has made.

| Aug 9, 2019

Perkins gives one of the best performances of his career in The Trial, aided by an outstanding array of stellar players.

| Feb 20, 2019

The whole film needs tightening and pulling together, with more chill to it and less prosy wandering, with more of the old Wellesian glitter and strength and less of this rather velvety, muffled effect.

| Jul 13, 2018

Out of all of Orson Welles's films, this might be the one with the most complex visual style, even the most beautiful.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 30, 2017

Who better to reveal the system's evil genius than Welles, the golden boy turned Hollywood martyr?

| Aug 28, 2017

The legal system is a literal maze in Welles' visualization and the disparate locations all lead back to one another.

| Jun 20, 2015

Overwhelmingly bleak, but exciting cinema.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 29, 2012

Labyrinthine, stylized and tragicomic, this adaptation of Kafka's novel sees Welles at his funniest, and his most despairing.

| Feb 29, 2012

Orson Welles' bounced Czech, via Kafka. Not the masterpiece that many Welles fanatics claim, but intriguing and outrageous enough for genuine appreciation.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 27, 2007