One of the discoveries of the year so far.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 16, 2019

It deals with difficult subject matter with extreme grace.

| Jun 14, 2019

While the child actors are often excellent, they don't get much to say, and it's asking a lot for boys of primary-school age to express soulful depths through glances alone.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 14, 2019

It is a thing of beauty: too beautiful perhaps, running a real danger of prettifying poverty.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 13, 2019

This movie is so gorgeous, it even makes drone footage look ethereal rather than pedestrian.

| Sep 15, 2018

There's a heavy dose of pathos, though the film isn't without its moments of levity. And while the narrative is fragmented, like a memory, by the end there's a seismic shift: And that's something like evolution.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 13, 2018

The conclusion is certain enough to be practically foregone, and if what leads up to it is aggressively arty, it's also artful and frank, a rare combination.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 7, 2018

Zagar builds a world that is simultaneously deeply authentic and dreamlike - the perfect combination to express a child's deeply felt but inherently distorted view of the universe he inhabits.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 30, 2018

One of the best of the year so far.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 24, 2018

The movie is all nuance and it continually wafts away into artiness.

| Original Score: C | Aug 24, 2018

[A] stunning, semi-impressionistic film...

| Aug 17, 2018

Every once in a while a movie grabs you, unsuspecting, and hustles its way into your heart. Jeremiah Zagar's "We the Animals" does that.

| Aug 17, 2018

A lot is told wordlessly very efficiently.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 17, 2018

The movie doesn't tell you things, it just sort of leaves it to you to infer them from what the kids see.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 17, 2018

Any potential sentimentality is obliterated by the film's tone and by the performances. It works best when it's most impressionistic.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 17, 2018

Zagar has smartly decided to tell this very subjective story of childhood with an Expressionist visual style that favors saturated colors, and he often leans on an unusually potent sound design that leads us seamlessly from one memory to the next.

| Aug 17, 2018

For his first narrative feature, the documentarian Zagar displays a thrillingly sensitive eye for the curiosity and caution that exists in every young child's heart, and how it is so simple for the world to crush that.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 17, 2018

Somehow... Zagar has found a way to let the film's scenes surface and recede the way memories do.

| Aug 17, 2018

"We the Animals" unfolds almost as a dream, albeit one that never shies away from the often hopeless reality of what it's like to grow up poor in America.

| Aug 16, 2018

On one level... "We the Animals" is a classic coming-of age tale; on another, it's a near perfect depiction of the emotional damage that can result from economic insecurity.

| Aug 16, 2018