Critics reviews

Its untethered, ethereal flow is utterly intoxicating, an immersive experience shaped by the clouds of cigarette and reefer smoke in the air, the smell of goat curry wafting from the kitchen, and above all, the sinuous rhythms of the slow-groove romantic reggae subgenre that gives the film its title.

Electric and alive as few films are, “Lovers Rock” will make you giddy with longing for a pleasure we’ve been too long denied: The singular rush of being one with a beat and a roomful of possibilities.

Lovers Rock lives on in the mind far beyond its actual ending. It is an hour and change spent in the company of black immigrants doing the rich, complicated, too-long-undepicted work of living on their own terms.

Lovers Rock, undoubtedly one of the best movies of the year, is a transfixing romance not just between the two characters at its center but one about the beauty of the human body, the succor of an energetic party, and the possibility in the hush of a night.

Even the dancing itself here has been choreographed and shot with such intoxicating poise, it feels like it’s breaking new ground.

Given McQueen's tendency to focus on human suffering, it's wonderful to see him cut loose here: Lovers Rock is easily the most exhilarating film he's ever made. It shows that joy itself can be an act of defiance, an expression of a community's life force and its will to survive.

While I strongly suspect Small Axe as a project will reach beyond the deliberately limited confines of this party, seeing Lovers Rock in isolation made for a wonderful—if pointedly fragile—utopia of Black vitality and happiness, created by the velvety, sensual photography of Shabier Kirchner and McQueen and Chris Dickens’s dance-transfixed editing.

McQueen’s phony nostalgia for the pre-hip-hop era when blacks were more culturally unified (“Put a smile on everybody’s face, no frowns!” urges the rotund DJ), inspires this film’s segregated visual scheme.

Unbothered and formalistically loose, the director displays a rarely-seen softer touch in an episode that’s as much about the sensory elements as the story.

The movie is the party, and you feel less like a spectator than like a participant, intoxicated by the hints of danger, the pulse of the music and the tantalizing possibility of love.

A film so sumptuously present that you feel like one of the partygoers.

McQueen’s unexpected fluidity in capturing an event channels his previous interest in sustained durational coups in an entirely different direction. No more prolonged Steadicam jogging or rigorously locked-in static frames: DP Shabier Kirchner repeatedly circles a dancefloor where the seams of the performers’ choreographed chaos never show.