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88Melissa Leo plays her without inflection, giving us no instructions about what our opinion should be. It is a brave performance, an act of empathy with a sad woman.
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80A small gem of bleak, neorealist portraiture.
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80The movie might very well have come off as a too-clinical experiment if it weren't for Leo, who maintains a rivetingly mysterious aura even as her character's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre.
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70A glum but tenderly observed micro-portrait of a woman struggling to re-enter society after being released from prison.
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58Francine is so minimalist that it has to rely almost entirely on Leo for solidity, and it would be a far stronger film if it supported and framed her more effectively.
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67While Francine distinguishes itself with atmospheric strangeness, Cassidy and Shatzky never create a satisfying whole.
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50Reveals itself to be a project of few interesting ideas.
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60At times Francine feels like a documentary as well, an intimate observational work in the mode of Frederick Wiseman or the Maysles brothers, where the omnipresence of the camera puts the characters so at ease that they reveal subtle moments of character that they might otherwise hide out of self-consciousness.
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50In a character study of an ex-con who gives her heart and mind to animals rather than people, Melissa Leo's risky performance is ultimately framed with a disappointing, distanced pity.
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Sep 13, 201238What with the unexciting hand-held camerawork, and the off-putting script and lead performance, Francine remains as frustrating as its inscrutable title character.
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Sep 11, 201270A minimalist, image-based character study that is almost impossibly fragile and yet emotionally robust, Francine is a legitimate discovery.