The Telegraph by Tim Robey

It has a slippery elegance, an ambitious way of nudging its nose into magic realism, and some unforgettable images.

Slant Magazine by Christopher Gray

As Mati Diop mourns Senegal’s lost men, she honors their grief and affords them tremendous power all at once.

RogerEbert.com by Monica Castillo

In watching so many films in a given week, month, or year, it’s rare to find one that sustains its thrills throughout its runtime, matches its gorgeous imagery with a compelling story, and defies easy categorization. Mati Diop’s haunting narrative feature debut Atlantics is one such movie. It’s unlike few other movies you’ll see this year or possibly this decade.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

Atlantics is a stunner that sneaks up on you: A folk tale, a police procedural, a ghost story, a love story, a fable of empowerment — Mati Diop’s directorial debut never stops evolving in new directions and meanings. It’s a work of magical realism close to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other masters of the game, and the confidence with which it has been made is thrilling.

Vanity Fair by K. Austin Collins

The mysteries of Atlantics, and there are plenty, are rooted in the question of what the lives of those men were worth—and of what, just as urgently, the life of a young woman like Ada might be worth, accordingly. But Diop’s approach to that question is elliptical, borne of a plot that mixes genres, religious superstitions, and the modernity of the cell phone age, into something wily and unpredictable.

Polygon by Karen Han

Diop’s film isn’t brash or loud, but it’s still stunning, capturing the migrant story and its effects in a new light.

Original-Cin by Liam Lacey

A magic realist fantasy, a ghost story, a love story and political allegory, Atlantics packs a deceptive amount of complexity in a gauzy, slender film.

Screen Daily by Allan Hunter

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.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

What begins as a realist snapshot of the global migrant crisis gradually expands into an aching story of love, loss and the return of the repressed.

The New York Times by A.O. Scott

It testifies to the variety and vitality of politically alert genre filmmaking. It’s a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well.

The Playlist

It bears the aesthetic and thematic hallmarks of an expertly rendered film with an impressively nuanced subjectivity.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

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.

CineVue by Martyn Conterio

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.

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.

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.

TheWrap by Ben Croll

If the narrative can sometimes wane, the film’s enveloping atmospherics remain tight throughout.

The A.V. Club by A.A. Dowd

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.

Variety by Jay Weissberg

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.