Little can prepare you for The Tribe in a number of senses, but it is unhesitatingly a film that should be considered essential for anyone with a passion for intelligent, challenging cinema.

| Aug 25, 2018

The movie is leisurely as well as graphic in its representation of sex and violence and, predicated on long takes, is visceral in a wholly unexpected way.

| Mar 28, 2017

With The Tribe, the power of communication is restructured and re-examined, with a story that's strange and disturbing enough to haunt you.

| Feb 22, 2017

The movie features no music, and no words, yet some moments are so powerful and visceral that I still caught myself covering my ears.

| Original Score: A- | Dec 31, 2015

The Tribe revels in the distance it leaves between its audience and its characters, but in placing viewers on the outside, it also creates an experience that's almost perversely empathetic.

| Nov 9, 2015

This is a challenging film that's not for everyone. Yet there's no denying its brilliant concept and its raw cinematic power.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 2, 2015

There is nothing else like The Tribe, at once a searing, singular vision of a particular time and place and a brutal metaphor for the wounded human condition.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 6, 2015

If there's one place where love has no place, it's here.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 31, 2015

If "The Tribe" were set in the hearing world, its desolation would seem reductive and forced, a pose rather than a statement. Without words, the movie becomes a nihilistic fable and, indeed, something unheard of until now. It's silent opera.

| Jul 23, 2015

Based on Slaboshpytskiy's experience as a crime reporter and on stories of Ukraine's "deaf Mafia," it's less a social portrait than an experiment in shaking up the balance of our senses: A tale of no sound, just fury.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 17, 2015

A stunning examination of teenage cruelty, exploitation, and crime that refuses to give us the satisfaction of identifying with the characters.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 16, 2015

Overlong and not always successful in its storytelling, Slaboshpitsky consistently returns to sex and violence to shore up a weak plot about a guy who falls for the wrong girl.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 16, 2015

An audacious and successful gamble from a first-time feature filmmaker who is now officially on his way.

| Jul 9, 2015

A startlingly original, at times unbearably intense drama from Ukraine that - on a moment-to-moment, scene-by-scene basis - blows up expectations on every level: narratively, visually and in terms of performance.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 9, 2015

The Tribe is a brilliant formal achievement that marks Ukrainian writer-director Miroslav Slaboshpitsky as a filmmaker to watch.

| Jul 9, 2015

It's got a story every bit as bold and fearless as its approach - the kind of primal story that's beyond the ken of language.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 9, 2015

Slaboshpitsky frames his problematic protagonists with painterly meticulousness, their feral posturing and nakedness conveyed with improbable beauty.

| Jul 9, 2015

I can safely say, with unequivocal authority, that you have never experienced anything like Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy's The Tribe.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 9, 2015

Slaboshpytskiy doesn't attempt to get inside the psychology of these people, or expand the meanings, political or otherwise, of their descent.

| Original Score: C+ | Jun 26, 2015

One need not read it as a metaphor for the director's homeland to appreciate the movie as a tour de force.

| Jun 25, 2015