Metacritic reviews

Schrader’s gaze is patient — tired, almost. He frames Gere’s aged face in tight close-ups, and it is as if we are seeing him for the first time, wrinkled and ragged and oh so very beautiful.

Oh, Canada might be a movie that was conceived in the long dark night of the soul, but it moves towards brightness and possibility.

Amid the formal fluidity, the forceful acting keeps us hooked.

Even by the director’s meditative standards, this one cuts close to the bone.

Oh, Canada can be a clunky film at times—with some awkward performances and labored dialogue—but it’s also an often fascinating match of director and actor, in which both seem to be trying to exorcize the demons of aging through art.

A movie that is neither Schrader’s best work nor his most scandalous.

For a film about big themes like mortality, memory, truth and redemption, Oh, Canada feels both slight and stubbornly page-bound, too unsatisfyingly fleshed out to give its actors meat to chew on.

Schrader adapts the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks into his own specific creation, and one that leaves viewers dizzied and lost by the chopped-up melancholy of it all.

Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment.

Schrader is a million miles from the potent anguish of First Reformed, the 2017 film that won him an Oscar; rather, this nearly rivals his 2013 erotic thriller The Canyons, starring Lindsay Lohan, for bewildering tedium.