Popular reviews

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  Review by Wes ★★★★½ 4

  a movie so good that i forgot everyone was acting for a good chunk of it

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  Review by Ethan Ethan ★★★★ 3

  Ah yes. People talking. My favorite genre.

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  Review by Lucy ★★★★

  SUNDANCE 2021: film #16

  “you say you wanna heal, we all do... is this how?”

  completely performance driven in the best sense. i was never too overwhelmed with emotion but there’s so much potency in the script that it still shines through, especially because of ann and martha. grief is never easy to translate into something tangible or understandable, but this does an incredible job of bringing it to life in a way that shows empathy and perspective to everyone involved. a heavy experience for sure

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  Review by jonathan fujii ★★★★½ 2

  Thought my screening was blurry until I realized it was just the tears in my eyes

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  Review by jing ★★★★★ 9

  When I got my ticket for Mass, I didn’t expect it to be lighthearted or joyful, but I also wasn’t expecting it to move me as much as it did: I sobbed, I wept, I probably used way too many tissues, and yet, in the end, I smiled. Mass confronts us with perhaps the greatest pain a parent can experience—the loss of a child. This film explores the meeting of two sets of parents; the parents whose son passed away, and the other parents whose child passed away, too, but who also took the lives of others with him. 

  Set mostly in one location, Mass is a heart-wrenching drama filled with moving performances, impeccable direction, phenomenal writing, and astonishing cinematography. It handles a…

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  Review by Matt Neglia ★★★★½ 3

  MASS is one of the most incredibly moving films I’ve ever seen as we listen in on a real-time tense conversation we shouldn’t be listening to. Honestly deconstructs America’s gun problem through four parents’ tragic grief. Emotional powerhouse performances from everyone! Wow!!

  Sundance #26

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  Review by David Chen ★★★★½ 6

  This movie was devastating. The subject is a downer and I understand not wanting to get into this mental space right now. But those who watch will be rewarded by four tour-de-force performances from incredible actors.

  A movie that explores grief, empathy, and forgiveness with grace and compassion.

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★

  A single-location drama about four people sitting in a sterile church anteroom and discussing — at length, and in real-time — the unequally shared tragedy that split their lives down the middle, “Mass” is so anti-cinematic at every turn that it almost comes as a surprise that it wasn’t adapted from a play or shot during COVID. And yet, at no point does this sobering and worthwhile feature debut from actor Fran Kranz (“The Cabin in the Woods”) feel like it shouldn’t have been a movie, or that it could’ve been anything else.

  The biggest reason for that is easy to appreciate, but hard to explain. It doesn’t have much to do with the pall created by the hallowed yet…

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  Review by Sean Fennessey 1

  Specific, vivid, and unflinching. This will get dinged for not quite eclipsing the "This is a play in movie's clothing" charge, but the decisions on who to put in the frame and when displays a thoughtful strategy carefully executed, especially for a first-time filmmaker. Ann Dowd and Jason Isaacs are remarkably good—restrained and explosive when needed. Looking forward to where Fran Kranz takes things as a writer-director.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★ 19

  The most devastating revelation of “Mass” is that you know, just minutes into the film, exactly where it will be taking you. 

  Actor Franz Kranz, in his debut as a director, does not exploit jingoistic imagery or talking points in his examination of four parents’ grief. Viewers, instead, enter with a horrific emotional familiarity that lays all of the groundwork for him. 

  If the most difficult feat as a director is to simply film actors speaking in a room, Kranz would have seemed to opt in to suffering, since - that is nearly the entirety of “Mass.” 

  But what Kranz lacks in experience behind the camera, he possesses with time spent on stage. In the last decade plus, he has…

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  Review by Quintin ★★★★½ 3

  The world mourned for ten. We mourned for eleven.

  
  
  

  An absolutely heartbreaking and layered story between four parents grieving over a tragic event. We don't see photos or flashbacks of the murderer and victim because the story isn't about the events but rather how people cope with loss. After about 100 minutes of breaking apart what has haunted all four adults for years, there is a single line that broke me. The hardest I've cried this year.

  Probably the only knock against this film is I can't imagine ever wanting to go through this again.

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  Review by Will Steele ★★★★ 5

  Words cannot capture just how cruel it is that someone else will win Ann Dowd’s Oscar this year