The New York Times by Glenn Kenny

Vitalina Varela is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.

Slant Magazine by Jake Cole

At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

As Vitalina Varela proves, Costa empowers his subjects by framing them as majestic storytellers and letting their stories take charge.

The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

His muse Ventura is there, too, cast as a meta character; he plays a clerygman who has lost his flock and now ministers to an abandoned church that looks suspiciously like a small movie theater. Which is about as close as Vitalina Varela comes to bluntly stating its themes: presence, absence, rekindled faith.

The New Yorker by Richard Brody

Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.

Screen Daily by Stephen Whitty

Lit like a Rembrandt, acted like a neo-Realist classic and with all the searing social conscience of a new Dardenne brothers film, Vitalina Varela is both richly familiar and profoundly unique; if occasionally a challenge to watch.

The Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young

An undeniably demanding but cumulatively rewarding mood piece.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

The austere beauty of Vitalina Varela is in faces of its characters, the darkness that envelops a corner of Lisbon tourists rarely see. It’s a somber, lyrical and relentlessly understated meditation on grief and a grudge.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Kate Taylor

The culminative effect of the cinematography is inconclusive as the character remains trapped in grief.

Variety by Jay Weissberg

Costa’s elongation of time (made more acute since there’s rarely enough light coming from the screen to check your watch) combined with his habit of doling out a few narrative details without exploration, results in a film that distances spectators not already in his thrall.