Restless City: Critic Reviews

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.

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

"Restless City" is tumescent with atmosphere.

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...

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

Restless City looks gorgeous, but has nothing to say.

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

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

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

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

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.