Slant Magazine by Andrew Schenker

Tsai isn't making a social-problem film here, and his critique of patriarchal control is secondary to his portrait of unbearable psychic conditions.

CineVue by Patrick Gamble

Tsai's Stray Dogs is a masterpiece of social-realism, a distinctive and beguiling study of society's displaced and marginalised that plays to the beat of its own drum and refuses to conform to cinema's own commodification.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip.

Film.com

Stray Dogs pushes Tsai’s cinema of laissez-faire long takes, performative observation and pangs of regret and loss to their extreme.

Film.com by Jake Cole

Stray Dogs pushes Tsai’s cinema of laissez-faire long takes, performative observation and pangs of regret and loss to their extreme.

The Playlist by Oliver Lyttelton

The filmmaking here is almost impossibly well-realized, right down to the evocative sound design, adding up to an fairly unforgettable experience.

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

The plight of this struggling family unit weighs more heavily on the heart with each passing minute, making Stray Dogs the rare marathon-length art film that seems to grow less oppressive the longer it goes on.

The Dissolve by Scott Tobias

Stray Dogs evokes the whole of Tsai’s filmography, but also pays off his collaboration with Lee, who shows a side of himself that’s been hidden away for all these years.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by Bilge Ebiri

This amazing, maddening film presents a series of extended, mostly static, terrifying tableaux of despair, poverty, and decay.

RogerEbert.com by Matt Zoller Seitz

It asks a lot of us. In fact it asks us to set aside everything we've been conditioned to think movies are, and roll with a different way of seeing and hearing things, and connect.

Time Out by Keith Uhlich

The lengthy final two shots (each running more than ten minutes) rank among the best work this inimitable artist has ever done.

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

The director’s austere minimalism has always been suspended between the mesmerizing and the distancing, and in his latest feature, the concentration on elliptical observation, mood and texture signals an almost complete rejection of narrative.

Village Voice by Danny King

An extreme, compassionate magnification of the minutiae of second-to-second existence (brushing teeth, counting money).

Variety by Guy Lodge

Tsai here seems to be stripping his ornately eccentric style down to formal fundamentals. A certain pictorial grace remains; his sense of humor, sadly, appears to have been largely tossed out with the bathwater.