Critics reviews

While the alienated diarist and Bressonian framework may constitute Schrader bingo to skeptics, this is his transcendental style at its sharpest: its climactic stylistic leaps demand an exhilarating suspension of disbelief, and its homage sequences illustrate a necessary repetition, evoking the recurring human tendency toward self-destruction.

A much more ambitious and substantial film than Ismaël’s Ghosts, and probably even Schrader’s best film to date (though still much inferior to anything by Bresson).

What happens when he connects with a young pregnant parishioner (Amanda Seyfried) is explosive, hallucinatory, too intense to survive in the "everyday." The crisis of faith that follows threatens to shatter his life, as well as the fabric of reality.

Never assume you know when a filmmaker has made his best film: Paul Schrader may have just done it at age 72 with First Reformed, a starkly elemental drama about spiritual and environmental anguish.

A deeply moving exploration of faith in the fallen world, Schrader’s triumph feels like both the summation, and the galvanizing beginning, of an extraordinary cinematic career.

Schrader’s First Reformed, shot in the classic square aspect ratio, doesn’t get as physically close to its characters but aims higher than You Were Never Really Here, seeking to reestablish and dramatize the deep connections between environmental collapse, capitalism, and despair.

It's filled with deliciously odd moments where one feels Schrader holding his audience at arm’s length. . . . I could feel the Los Angeles arthouse audience I saw the film with resisting [one] sequence, perfectly fulfilling the purpose of disparity to build distance and irony between the screen and the audience until “the moment of decisive action”.

It really feels like the culmination and apotheosis of all things Schrader–-not just his own filmography as a screenwriter and/or director (this is obviously of a piece with Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Last Temptation of Christ, Affliction, etc.) but also his influential work as a theorist of film style.

Ernst may be falling apart, but Hawke’s measured, anguished acting holds it together, and it has to, because Schrader, whose age and semi-exile from the studios have combined into a true give-no-fucks mandate, goes hard in the home stretch. One of the really wondrous things here is the way that the basic realism of Schrader’s style . . . gradually starts warping in sync with its protagonist’s consciousness.

When the film’s crises reach their peak, all at once, it’s overwhelming. Schrader has issued us a reminder of what can happen when an artist puts his finger on the pulse of collective torment—or rather, pokes a finger in the eye of that torment, stirring it up. Taking after some of his named influences—Robert Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu— he’s reminded us of the power of deceptively simple images.

The imperative sense that Toller must somehow get beyond the din of dulling language is the animating tension of First Reformed, which builds to a climax of subsuming mania thanks in no small part to Hawke’s total commitment, descending into frothing, feral ferocity as he girds his torso with a homemade twist on the penitent’s hair shirt.

In the moment I deliver that unstinting endorsement, I feel compelled to add that this is a very special film for a certain, inevitably rather limited audience. In line with other Schrader movies, but perhaps more so than any, it defines itself _against_ many of the central assumptions and conventions of most mainstream moviemaking.