As an existential objet d'art Zama stands as a serious achievement. But that won't prevent even the most sophisticated of cinephiles from staggering out of the theater, wondering "What in the world did I just see?"

| Original Score: B | Feb 12, 2020

This blackly funny-and ultimately haunting-examination of colonial history is thoroughly characteristic in its brilliant manipulation of physical space.

| Jan 17, 2019

If cinema is about being transported to another place, Martel is unrivaled as a guide...

| Dec 7, 2018

Told in the typically oblique style of Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, this adaptation of Antonio di Benedetto's novel is nonetheless a pointed fable about the futility of colonialism.

| Sep 27, 2018

You have to find your own way through Zama, slowed down by the tropical torpor that hangs over the whole film. The pace is languid, the style is cryptic and the mood is downbeat, to say the least.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 26, 2018

Some movies unfold as dreams; "Zama" dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 5, 2018

Textured, slow-burning and hypnotic, the most resolutely arthouse release since Hard to Be a God unfolds as a fever dream.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 8, 2018

A beguiling cinematic journey through identity formation in Latin America.

| May 27, 2018

What's most compelling...is the way Martel skewers the history of colonialism without voyeuristically indulging in the moment of conquest.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 27, 2018

Martel has made a woozy epic about the toxicity of torpor.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 25, 2018

Almost too well, and certainly too well to let us sit back comfortably, Martel has nailed colonialism as a living death.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 25, 2018

It's impeccably done...

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 24, 2018

Zama is a story that obviously has something of Beckett and Kafka, but creates worryingly plausible real-world evocations of their cosmic loneliness and bureaucratic imprisonment.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 24, 2018

In adapting Antonio di Benedetto's 1956 novel for the screen, writer-director [Lucrecia] Martel offers a very different perspective on the colonial experience.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 23, 2018

The film puts us in a trance, too: one of bewildered, bottomless wonder.

| May 23, 2018

Hard to suppress the hyperbole with this one. Truly an awesome achievement.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 23, 2018

There's absolutely nothing else like it in theaters this year, which I mean as both a hearty endorsement and a necessary forewarning.

| May 21, 2018

The reason to see it is what happens as Zama inexorably loses his mind. Delusions seize him, apparitions come and go.

| Apr 26, 2018

A brilliantly discomfiting portrait of European colonialism and its discontents...

| Apr 26, 2018

As it goes, Zama ponders the unanswerable question of what kind of life, exactly, is worth living.

| Original Score: B | Apr 20, 2018