Critic Reviews

• Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

  "Restless City" is tumescent with atmosphere.

• Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

  "Restless City" possesses a poetic, contemplative sensibility as attuned to the vagrant beauty of polyglot urban life as to its chaotic unpredictability.

• Nicolas Rapold, New York Times

  Mr. Dosunmu seems to have directed all his actors to pause before delivering lines, giving a languor to the film that comes to feel studied.

• Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times

  In its portrait of a "Restless City" the film is strangely inert and feels like the work of image-makers, not storytellers.

• Ernest Hardy, Village Voice

  Told in an elliptical style with a pacing and jagged rhythms that take some getting used to, the thrust and power of the film lies in its poetic imagery...

• Miles Bowe, Boston Phoenix

  Restless City looks gorgeous, but has nothing to say.

• Michael Dequina, TheMovieReport.com

  Inviting and intriguing in its beauty, grit, and danger, familiar yet foreign.

• Gary Thompson, Philadelphia Daily News

  Violent episodes explode and recede, but without context and emotional connection, they're sometimes just pictures.

• Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine

  The script simply isn't in the same league as the images that Andrew Dosunmu and the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young have fashioned.

• Kam Williams, AALBC.com

  Forget pimps, it's apparently just as hard out there for a street peddler.

• Brent Simon, Shockya.com

  Beautiful but inert, Restless City is like a grimy lost verse of Jay-Z's 'Empire State of Mind' -- a film concerned with locating the quiet nobility in hand-to-mouth existence, and celebrating struggle for self-betterment via dollar bills, y'all.

Read all 11 critic reviews