New York Daily News by Stephen Whitty

Silence is a slowly unfolding, deeply thoughtful film about questioning yourself. About questioning authority. About taking stock of where you've failed as a human being, and wondering how you can make amends — to yourself, to others, and to God.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

Scorsese has hit the rare heights of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer, artists who found in religion a battleground that often left the strongest in tatters, compromised and ruined. It’s a movie desperately needed at a moment when bluster must yield to self-reflection.

Miami Herald by René Rodríguez

Silence feels like a career summation for a filmmaker who has spent his life exploring his faith through his work. Here is a movie about the importance of religion that will move you, regardless of whichever God you worship — or don’t.

Chicago Sun-Times by Richard Roeper

What beauty. What brutality. What madness.

Slate by Dana Stevens

Despite its technical and visual grandeur, there’s a moral simplicity to Silence that can sometimes recall the work of perhaps the other greatest deeply Catholic filmmaker, the French master Robert Bresson.

RogerEbert.com by Matt Zoller Seitz

Silence is a monumental work, and a punishing one.

Consequence by Blake Goble

Profound and illusory, Silence shows Martin Scorsese at the confessional, in sensationally cinematic style, delivering perhaps his most intimate work to date.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

Building implacable dread and tension from scene to scene, the story is as simple as its underlying ideas are endlessly complex.

Time by Stephanie Zacharek

Silence is something to see whether you’re certain there’s a God or whether you just believe in sunlight, which covers just about everybody.

The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy

Silence, more successfully than not, artfully addresses the core issue of its maker's lifelong religious struggle.

Screen Daily by Tim Grierson

Uneven, sometimes repetitive but also powerfully moving and thought-provoking, Silence is an imperfect movie that’s very hard to shake.

Empire by Ian Freer

Less showy than The Last Temptation Of Christ, more gripping than Kundun, the third part of Scorsese’s unofficial ‘religious’ trilogy is beautifully made, staggeringly ambitious and utterly compelling.

Screen International by Tim Grierson

Uneven, sometimes repetitive but also powerfully moving and thought-provoking, Silence is an imperfect movie that’s very hard to shake.

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

With ambition and reach, and often a real dramatic grandeur, Scorsese’s film has addressed the imperial crisis of Christian evangelists with stamina, seriousness and a gusto comparable to David Lean’s.

IndieWire by Eric Kohn

A slow-burn tale filled with beautiful imagery and understated performances, its elegance yields one of Scorsese’s most subtle efforts.

TheWrap by Robert Abele

It’s an invitingly austere movie, designed for both searching believers and curious others. The film can be cinematically rigorous, but it’s never ritualistically flashy.

Variety by Peter Debruge

Though undeniably gorgeous, it is punishingly long, frequently boring, and woefully unengaging at some of its most critical moments.... Still, viewed through the narrow prism of films about faith, Silence is a remarkable achievement.