100
Village Voice by Amy Nicholson
This sparse marvel leaves the audience rattled by how small decisions lead to big consequences. Still, you're most likely to leave the theater gushing about the cast's bravura unbroken performances.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.
100
Hands down one of the best films of the year, Sebastian Schipper has directed a one-shot film that is truly a captivating cinematic experience.
80
Audiences may come down from the high a little sooner than the film does, with the characters’ increasingly ill-considered actions testing our faith and engagements to the breaking point, but the sheer centripetal force of the film’s vigorous technique never loses its hold.
83
This first section is so charming and well-observed, and creates such real chemistry between the two terrific leads, that it's almost a shame that it's there to invest us in them just so the fast-paced genre flick to come has an anchor.
60
Screen International by Lee Marshall
It stretches character credibility, and resorts too much to criminal-underworld cliché and the driving pace of its own perpetual motion, which curiously does nothing to paper over the longueurs in certain over-stretched sequences. You come out on a high of sorts – but it soon fades.
50
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Shooting an entire feature film continuously, without a single cut, is a dumb idea. It was a dumb idea 67 years ago, when Alfred Hitchcock attempted to create the illusion of having done so in "Rope" (hiding the necessary edits by zooming into actors’ backs), and it’s still a dumb idea today, when lightweight video cameras make the feat genuinely possible.
100
Despite the strong performances, it’s Schipper’s single-shot conceit - and the fact that he and his team pulled it off with aplomb - that makes Victoria such a bracing triumph. While the entire enterprise is inarguably a stunt, Victoria manages to overwhelm in ways that few films do.
60
Schipper's script doesn't quite complement his technical prowess and once you peer behind the smoke and mirrors of the film's one-take gimmick the criminal-underworld lurking behind it feels trite and contrived.... Yet none of this can take away from its pure entertainment factor. An experience akin to a burst of pure adrenaline intravenously introduced to your bloodstream, Victoria remains one helluva ride.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton
It is a testament to the immersive immediacy of Victoria that the scale of its technical achievement only really dawns on you afterwards.