“Six decades ago, David Lean ventured to the sprawling sandstone mountains of Wadi Rum to film the world’s most interesting canvas: the human face. This credo is not dissimilar from that of Winnipeg-shot A. Rimbaud, the latest micro-budget feature from American indie virtuoso Patrick Wang (A Bread Factory), whose contained, stripped-bare, three-hour biopic of French poet Arthur Rimbaud plays like a black box Lawrence of Arabia. It’s wonderful and fascinating.
Not only does it gradually accustom viewers to its aural idiosyncrasies—we become entirely used to dialogue manifesting as music and silence—but it also takes a distinct turn towards a more traditional, more classical visual staging, in a way that ought not to be possible for a film like this one. This happens by way of Draper’s closeups, which are so unyielding, so tactile and so thoughtfully layered by Barrera’s conscientious lighting and warm, visceral 35mm photography, that they’re indecipherable from closeups in a traditional studio picture — not to mention, just as effective, as though Wang had found some secret avenue to the soul.
The maddening emotional impact of A. Rimbaud, in its final act, is no different from that of even the most lavish Hollywood epics, but its most intimate transmissions are born of the kind of maverick indie spirit that demands a complete re-orientation of audiovisual language in a way few modern experimentalists would attempt with traditional technology. It’s a look back at the old, established forms of storytelling that breaks them open from within, practically forcing the box of cinema to take new shape as Wang transmutes what’s expected, and what’s possible, with a camera, an actor and imagination.”
—Siddhant Adlakha, Variety
“Early days, still, but I suspect I won’t see a better movie this year than Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud. Easy to pinpoint precedents (Syberberg, Resnais, Rivette, Straub-Huillet), as well as to presuppose terms like ‘unconventional’ and ‘overlong’ being bandied about by bemused/baffled/bored commentators. I’ll go for my own cliché: It’s its own thing, stem to stern, and gloriously so — a summative work by a genuine artist that rewired my every sense and synapse.
A single actor — the Australian Blake Draper, whose only prior feature is the Disney streaming movie Prom Pact (2023) — is onscreen for the entirety of the 175-minute runtime. He portrays the French poet Arthur Rimbaud from his virtuosically unhinged teen years as the enfant terrible of the Gallic literary scene through to his more rigorous and ‘reputable’ middle-aged exploits as a colonial merchant in Abyssinia. It’s a performance that at first blush feels vaguely raw and ragged (is the callowness on display an amateurish limitation or a (sub)conscious manifestation?) and by the end so precise in its every choice and effect that the full scope of Wang and Draper’s collaborative effort becomes awe-strikingly evident.”
Keith Uhlich, (All (Parentheses))
“Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud (2026), an utterly original ‘one-man-film’ biopic that traces the visionary writer’s life from his adolescent years to his untimely death at 37, underscores Rimbaud’s ambition at the outset. Its first image, through rack focusing, shows a small patch of what appears to be a cave wall engulfed in darkness, lit only with a sharp spotlight. We see more of the wall when another off-screen light source bathes the space in an amber glow just as the teenage Rimbaud (Blake Draper) emerges from the unlit foreground and occupies the center of the frame, as if he himself has brought the fire. Draper’s doe-eyed face and remarkably assured line delivery of Rimbaud’s precocious observations animate the blank spaces of the frame with ingenuous conviction and lust for life.
Above all, A. Rimbaud is a film that grapples with the poetic form: not the kind that forces the viewer to extract a vague revelation from meandering nature shots, but one that emulates the succinct arrangement of words that give structure to life’s wonders. If we can call Wang’s vision ‘poetic,’ it has everything to do with how it urges us to be more precise with our expressions. Vladimir Nabokov’s dictum that ‘in a work of art there is a kind of merging between [...] the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science’ applies to A. Rimbaud. The journey to Rimbaud’s delirium requires not chaos, but rigor, as evidenced by Wang’s fastidious mise-en-scène and prosodic undertaking. For even ineffable enchantment needs precise forms to appeal to our senses."
Jawni Han, Reverse Shot
“As the halfway point of 2026 nears, many publications are posting lists of the best films of the year so far. One title that has not popped up in any list I’ve seen so far is a film that is my pick for the best of the year to date: A. Rimbaud, an experimental three-hour biopic of 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud.
Even as Rimbaud’s life story unfolds in a straightforward chronological manner, Wang uses visual and aural elements to evoke the hallucinatory quality of his writing. A. Rimbaud is a biopic made in the manner of a psychological dreamscape, with Wang’s juxtaposition of linear narrative and surreal style doing more to suggest its subject’s inner life than most biopics’ literal-minded attempts at reductive cause-and-effect connections between biography and art.
Beyond Draper’s virtuosic performance and its evocations of Rimbaud’s life and work…Wang’s experimentation has a deeper purpose. Theater, of course, preceded cinema, and the films of the late 19th and early 20th centuries often come off like little more than filmed theater to modern eyes. With A. Rimbaud, Wang dares to revert to a pre-cinematic approach to reinvigorate his, and by extension our, sense of the expressive possibilities of the medium. In a time when mainstream cinema has long been coarsened by maximalist yet soulless special-effects spectacle, A. Rimbaud feels genuinely, exhilaratingly radical in its belief that less can indeed be more.”
Kenji Fujishima, Book and Film Globe
“A. Rimbaud has been touring this country slowly and unpredictably, picking up fans and momentum en route. Once again, like his previous masterpiece, it was turned down by every film festival it was submitted to, in effect punished for its uniqueness.
A. Rimbaud is ‘a’ particular Rimbaud—that is, a piquant blend of Wang’s Rimbaud, Draper’s, and (at least in this review) my own, just one among many possible versions and certainly not everyone’s, but one size fits all. We should bear in mind that this writer was a favorite of writer-director Samuel Fuller as well as Bob Dylan and Patti Smith.
If Wang’s film is part of any program, this is the project of introducing us to Rimbaud’s life through his work. This ‘work’ includes poetry as well as business, both of them conducted and managed through his writing. What we make of it all is a matter of our art and our business. Wang’s art and business are to keep us interested, generating a private space between Draper-Rimbaud and us in order to do so. It works if we can furnish the other half of the dialogue, becoming a participant as well as a spectator.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Newsletter