83
It bears the aesthetic and thematic hallmarks of an expertly rendered film with an impressively nuanced subjectivity.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
67
Atlantics is most successful as a look at a particular milieu, which makes one wonder if Diop might have been better off just making a longer nonfiction film on the subject.
90
An intense romance notable for the craft of the filmmaking and Diop’s original approach to complex issues of love, loss and the forces for change that can rise from the ashes of tragedy.
70
If the narrative can sometimes wane, the film’s enveloping atmospherics remain tight throughout.
83
Diop’s first feature doesn’t always fit together from a narrative perspective, but it musters such an absorbing vision of an alienated seaside life that not everything needs to add up for the atmosphere to take hold.
60
The result offers mixed levels of satisfaction, most successful in capturing the protagonist’s leap into adulthood and her increasing reliance on the forthright, independent-minded women around her.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Leslie Felperin
A lot of ideas about class, post-imperialism and spiritual values peek up out of the surface of the text, but they're not developed with much rigor compared to what Diop conjured with more intensity and less time in A Thousand Suns. All the same, this is a striking work.
80
It doesn’t quite click, is too weird, leads to a lurch from one cinematic style to the other and fails to gel as a satisfying whole. Yet the director’s imaginative intention is apparent in the first shot.
80
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.
100
It has a slippery elegance, an ambitious way of nudging its nose into magic realism, and some unforgettable images.
Ghost story, love story, coming-of-age narrative, and capitalist critique intertwined. Mati Diop’s beautiful visuals, seen particularly when the film returns to images of the ocean, carry the viewer through the story’s ideas of spectrality and temporality.