89
Metascore
26 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100The GuardianXan BrooksThe GuardianXan Brooks[Martel's] film is haunted, haunting and admittedly prone to the occasional longueur insofar as it runs to its own peculiar rhythm; maybe even its own primal logic.
- 100Slant MagazineChristopher GraySlant MagazineChristopher GrayHow strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s.
- 100The New York TimesManohla DargisThe New York TimesManohla DargisMs. Martel is exploring the past, how we got here and why, but she is more interested in relations of power than in individual psychological portraits. The monstrous must be humanized to be understood, which doesn’t mean it deserves our tears.
- 90Village VoiceVillage VoiceMartel engages directly with Argentina’s colonial legacy, although her approach remains allusive and layered. She transforms Benedetto’s epic into a dizzying, sensory head trip about a man’s gradual psychological decay, allowing larger historical and political themes to emerge organically from her meticulous formal compositions.
- 83The A.V. ClubA.A. DowdThe A.V. ClubA.A. DowdIn its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine.
- 83The PlaylistJessica KiangThe PlaylistJessica KiangThe formal control is remarkable, but sometimes almost stultifying, as though Martel had spent every moment of this intervening decade plotting how to pack each scene more densely, to the point it feels like Zama” could maybe stop a bullet. It will certainly deter the less persistent viewer.
- 80Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganScreen DailyFionnuala HalliganIt’s confusing and heavy and bears down hard until a third-act swerve throws in colours and movement and spins the viewer out of the theatre in wonder. It won’t be forgotten.
- 60The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyThe Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneyFor much of its running time, Zama is merely remote and enervating, too accurately reflecting its protagonist’s predicament.
- 58The Film StageZhuo-Ning SuThe Film StageZhuo-Ning SuIt’s tonally and thematically so fragmented, the context simply isn’t there.