91
As Vitalina Varela proves, Costa empowers his subjects by framing them as majestic storytellers and letting their stories take charge.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
100
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
Vitalina Varela is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.
83
The A.V. Club by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
His muse Ventura is there, too, cast as a meta character; he plays a clerygman who has lost his flock and now ministers to an abandoned church that looks suspiciously like a small movie theater. Which is about as close as Vitalina Varela comes to bluntly stating its themes: presence, absence, rekindled faith.
100
At last, Pedro Costa appears to be more interested in how people get on with life than how they keep the company of ghosts.
60
Costa’s elongation of time (made more acute since there’s rarely enough light coming from the screen to check your watch) combined with his habit of doling out a few narrative details without exploration, results in a film that distances spectators not already in his thrall.
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Kate Taylor
The culminative effect of the cinematography is inconclusive as the character remains trapped in grief.
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Neil Young
An undeniably demanding but cumulatively rewarding mood piece.
80
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
Spectacular images, ideas, emotions, and performances are embedded in the lugubrious pace and tone of Pedro Costa’s modernist fusion of classic melodrama and documentary.
75
The austere beauty of Vitalina Varela is in faces of its characters, the darkness that envelops a corner of Lisbon tourists rarely see. It’s a somber, lyrical and relentlessly understated meditation on grief and a grudge.
80
Screen Daily by Stephen Whitty
Lit like a Rembrandt, acted like a neo-Realist classic and with all the searing social conscience of a new Dardenne brothers film, Vitalina Varela is both richly familiar and profoundly unique; if occasionally a challenge to watch.