Aftersun

"Wells’ debut is a frankly astonishing work which will leave a lasting impression."

— John Bleasdale, CineVue

"A stunner, a heartbreaker on love, grief and the random moments in life that solidify into haunting memories."

— Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

"Deftly constructed and utterly heartbreaking, Aftersun announces Charlotte Wells as an eminent storyteller of prodigious powers."

— Pat Brown, Slant Magazine

"Aftersun cuts you in two with such emotional intensity, such impressive dramatic force, that I could only sit and fight back the inevitable tears."

— Barry Hertz, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"Rumors of something remarkable have circled around “Aftersun” since its première, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and guess what? The rumors are true."

— Anthony Lane, New Yorker

"Aftersun is a film about memory and regret, of finding small islands of warmth and happiness and holding on; a movie that beautifully struggles to say what is unsaid."

— Allen Johnson, San Francisco Chronicle

"The way the visuals all dance across the screen in flashes of brilliance that strip away the barriers between form and feeling until they become one is nothing short of spectacular."

— Chase Hutchinson, Collider

"By combining her nostalgic take on formative family holidays with an unflinching portrait of conflicting personal identity, Aftersun intentionally delivers an emotional sucker punch few will soon forget."

— Martin Carr, We Got This Covered

"Though any honest summation can't do it justice, Charlotte Wells's tender feature debut is the kind of revelation that movie fans dream of finding: not a wow so much as a guaranteed piece of emotional ravishment."

— Joshua Rothkopf, Entertainment Weekly

"A tribute to father-daughter relationships and the feeling of looking back on your childhood and realizing what your parents were going through, how much they loved you, and how you'll never really know who they were."

— Alexis Potter, Arizona Republic

"If Wells has assembled a note-perfect evocation of a highly specific chapter — the end of a millennium and possibly something else — it’s when she deliberately breaks with realism that this gently aching movie achieves an overwhelming emotional force."

— Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

"A stunning debut that develops with the gradual poignancy of a Polaroid, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun isn’t just an honest movie about the way that we remember the people we’ve lost — fragmented, elusive, nowhere and everywhere all at once — it’s also a heart-stopping act of remembering unto itself."

— David Ehrlich, IndieWire

"It’s hard to find a critical language to account for the delicacy and intimacy of this movie. This is partly because Wells, with the unaffected precision of a lyric poet, is very nearly reinventing the language of film, unlocking the medium’s often dormant potential to disclose inner worlds of consciousness and feeling."

— A.O. Scott, The New York Times