Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Rea

While White Material is very much the story of this one woman, it is also a story of postcolonial Africa, a place where Europeans staked their claim, and where disorder and destruction upended everything. A mournful, frightening, powerful film.

The New York Times by Manohla Dargis

Ms. Denis has an extraordinary gift for finding the perfect image that expresses her ideas, the cinematic equivalent of what Flaubert called le mot juste.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

It's a portrait, by turns chilling, thrilling, mysterious and terrifying, of a woman who refuses to be terrorized.

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

French mood-and-feeling master filmmaker Claire Denis returns to the Africa of her youth for an intense, mysterious drama exploring revolution and loss.

Portland Oregonian by Stan Hall

The result is somewhat elliptical but also thoroughly engrossing and propulsive. Compared to Denis' earlier work, it's practically an action movie.

Variety by Jay Weissberg

Structurally, White Material unfolds like a novel, undoubtedly partly due to the work of Denis' co-scripter, author Marie N'Diaye. That said, it's still very much a Denis film, not just in the complexity of the characters and their motivations -- Huppert shoulders the narrative effortlessly, her strength and direction unwavering -- but in the framework and editing.

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

Claire Denis's strongest movie in the decade since "Beau Travail," her tense, convulsive White Material is a portrait of change and a thing of terrible beauty.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

This is a beautiful, puzzling film. The enigmatic quality of Huppert's performance draws us in.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Calvin Wilson

Unhurried in its storytelling but unshakable in its impact.

NPR by Ella Taylor

Yet in the end it's less the climactic madness and mayhem in White Material that sear the memory than it is the silent, balletic creep of child soldiers, grabbed out of school and sent with machetes and rifles through a forest to exact revenge for decades of repression.

Chicago Reader by J.R. Jones

This haunting drama by Claire Denis burns with a mute fear and rage at the ongoing atrocities in central Africa.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

Its dramatic vexations are at war with Denis' prodigious visual skill. And the fight, ultimately, rewards the viewer.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

What sustains the film is its tone of almost hallucinatory foreboding. White Material isn't about the calm before the storm but the seconds before the deluge.

Washington Post by Michael O'Sullivan

A lean and hungry thing. With the sparest of storytelling, the French filmmaker ("35 Shots of Rum") devours her audience, swallowing us up in a yarn that is as enigmatic as it is engrossing.

San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle

Denis' viewpoint and sympathies are sophisticated, complex and humane.

Empire by Patrick Peters

Claire Denis' drama is an overly fastidious but insight-filled look at post-colonial Africa.

Boxoffice Magazine by Richard Mowe

This is one of Denis's most provocative films and also one of her most compelling.