95
Stray Dogs pushes Tsai’s cinema of laissez-faire long takes, performative observation and pangs of regret and loss to their extreme.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
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.
70
An extreme, compassionate magnification of the minutiae of second-to-second existence (brushing teeth, counting money).
80
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.
60
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.
80
The lengthy final two shots (each running more than ten minutes) rank among the best work this inimitable artist has ever done.
91
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.
100
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.
100
The Telegraph by Robbie Collin
Every shot of Stray Dogs has been built with utter formal mastery; every sequence exerts an almost telepathic grip.
90
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.