San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson

The brilliance of Dark Waters is that it is able to lay out the case against DuPont without getting too wonky.

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

A great movie like Dark Waters reminds us of what happened, of just what the “system” failed to do to safeguard us. And it reminds us of what a legal crusade looks like — a years-long grind of discovery, depositions, evidence and trials, and to be thankful for dogged, dull pluggers like Robert Bilott who stopped a mass murder in progress, armed with only a degree from “a no name law school.”

Observer by Rex Reed

Riveting, responsible and deeply unsettling, a first-rate film like Dark Waters is a rare and welcome chapter in the dramatic fabric of how one unlikely person can make a big dent in the world of social injustice.

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

What gives Dark Waters its singular texture is that Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”), who has never made a drama remotely like this, colors in the scenario with an underlying dimension of personalized obsession.

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

What makes it a Haynes film, besides the evocative camera genius of Haynes regular Ed Lachman, is something intangible and mysterious. The director’s admirers will think immediately of "Safe," the 1995 indie classic starring Julianne Moore as a wife and mother who thinks she’s being poisoned by something unidentifiable in the environment. That feeling of dread pervades throughout, and deepens the film’s scarily timely themes beyond the usual demands of docudrama.

Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern

Mr. Haynes, a notable stylist whose work is sometimes tinged with surrealism, was an improbable choice to direct this material, though a fine one, as it turns out. Like Rob, the film isn’t flashy, but it is honorable, admirable and improbably stirring.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

The combination of Ruffalo’s quietly intense performance and Haynes’ direction illuminates both what drives him and what the cost can be.

The New Yorker by Richard Brody

The director Todd Haynes’s artistry is hardly detectable in this environmental thriller, yet the film, based on a true story, nonetheless offers a stirring and infuriating story of brazen corporate indifference to employees, neighbors, and the world at large—and the obstacles faced by those who challenge it.

The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy

Successfully restraining himself throughout from getting fancy or experimental, Haynes has intently devoted himself to the story and his actors, with strong, unshowy work that ideally serves the tale being told.

Screen Daily by Fionnuala Halligan

The subtle brilliance of its mise-en-scene, from 1980s Ohio boardrooms and rubber-chicken dinners to all-black wait staff and the casual discrimination against women, beds the story in the awful truth.