Costa-who is one of the great image makers-visualizes that sense of relief and renewal beautifully. It's amazing how powerful the sight of blue skies can be after being plunged into endless night.

| Jan 27, 2021

The enduring paradox of Costa's work is that this setting has its own irresistible glamour, reminiscent of fashion photography; the people he films are his models.

| Aug 6, 2020

Vitalina Varela is demanding, rewarding, and ineffably stirring.

| Mar 26, 2020

Almost all of the film takes place at night, except the very end, when there is daylight and even sunlight. The result is weirdly moving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 5, 2020

Costa remains a master of digital chiaroscuro, of political ghost stories - and of the lives other films leave outside the frame.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 4, 2020

Rich, mysterious, rigorous and generous.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 4, 2020

Costa rejects voyeurism and condescension in favor of a form of storytelling solidarity with his actors, one where there's no buffer of irony, no distancing effects.

| Feb 21, 2020

A breathtakingly gorgeous movie about love, death, and immigration.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 21, 2020

[T]he surface quietudes, somnambulant movements, and rigors of a film like Vitalina Varela serve to turn every subtlety, every crinkling plastic bag and squeaky door, into a reverberating event.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 21, 2020

It's essential cinema.

| Feb 20, 2020

[Vitalina Varela] invests a tragic episode in its heroine's life with an intimacy and grace that forges new dimensions in Costa's cinema.

| Feb 19, 2020

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa's modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

| Feb 10, 2020

Your eyes drift toward every beam of light, every carefully placed pool of illumination in this grimly beautiful nightscape, the latest work by an artist who has found, in darkness, a remarkable new way of seeing.

| Feb 7, 2020

Masters of the elegiac need not measure every somber sigh. In this Portuguese drama, Costa proves his immense talent for matching the esoteric with the human.

| Oct 29, 2019

With such intense chiaroscuro, its images can prove heartbreaking.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 7, 2019

Only the powerful screen presence of the lead, whose life story this is, saves this punishingly dark work from drowning in its own purposeful opacity.

| Aug 17, 2019

Another lyrical vision of somber people confronting their past.

| Original Score: A- | Aug 16, 2019

Even if audiences find themselves adrift in the convolutions of the screenplay's non-linear narrative, there are near-incessant compensations in the form of Leonardo Simoes' cinematography.

| Aug 15, 2019