Although Kokotajlo doesn’t feel entirely at home in the horror genre, he is clearly a talent to be reckoned with. Perhaps he’s at his best when working -- as he did with Apostasy -- with more personal material.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 11, 2024

Some pleasingly icky special effects add to the general sense of mouldering menace. Where the picture stumbles, however, is in its almost total lack of effective scares.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 10, 2024

Definitively worth checking out.

Full Review | Sep 9, 2024

It lacks the intimate and the specific. But, hell, Starve Acre does end with one of the oddest, most off-putting images you’ll see at the cinema this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 7, 2024

The terrain between pagan folklore and psychodrama is turned over here by hand fork: it’s delicately developed as metaphor, but lacks the crazed tilt into shock it needs for major impact.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2024

But the animatronic hare is lethal in all the wrong ways, being possibly the worst horror film effect since the talking goat in Drag Me to Hell... Be afraid? Unfortunately, no.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 6, 2024

However, apart from some splendid effects work and a bravura score from Matthew Herbert, Kokotajlo’s film ultimately comes up short.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 5, 2024

Starve Acre is sometimes overly derivative as a folk-horror — but Daniel Kokotajlo’s second film crafts a sinister Yorkshire, replete with impressively gnarly special effects and a strong performance from Morfydd Clark.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 5, 2024

The folk horror-drama Starve Acre finds suspense in the silence.

Full Review | Aug 16, 2024

If you dig moody oddities with a dash of humor and a Gothic look that puts you ill at ease throughout, grab it.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 7, 2024

At times, it’s scary how derivative it is. Still, as crepuscular weirdness seeps across the story and leads to a delirious ending, it’s largely effective.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2024

A stunning throwback feature grounded by two compelling leads, but one too narratively and thematically sparse to make much of an impact.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024

Aiming for authenticity, Kokotajlo finds supernatural power and dramatic weight in the genre’s rustic simplicity.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 25, 2024

this 1970s-set folk horror, unnervingly scored by Matthew Herbert, unearths something primeval and toxic at the very roots of a once, and perhaps again, happy family.

Full Review | Oct 23, 2023

No one person in “Starve Acre” screams, speaks or behaves quite as people should, which is key to the film’s baleful pull: Kokotajlo, at least, brings a fierce discipline to its disorder.

Full Review | Oct 20, 2023

Perfectionist direction and subtly unsettling mood give a bespoke edge to what would otherwise come perilously close to being a Gothic shaggy dog story (although a dog is not the beast at issue here).

Full Review | Oct 20, 2023

Smith and Clark, at the head of a very capable supporting cast, keep the movie on an even dramatic keel, with intelligent, thought-through performances putting life back into some familiar tropes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 20, 2023