Critic Reviews

This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. A Thousand and One isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.

In A Thousand and One, [Rockwell] packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.

First-time feature director A.V. Rockwell, working from her own script, tells an epic tale in miniature.

It is tempting to call A Thousand and One a love letter of sorts, but a more accurate read might be one of heartbreak. There is love here, certainly, but more than that there is frustration, anger and sadness at the way the world refuses to help those trying hardest to endure within it.

Rockwell’s vigorous detailing of personal life—with its evocation of inner lives—is at the heart of its political vision and of its dramatic strength.

The film is utterly absorbing, anchored by the unpredictable performance of Taylor, playing a hopelessly complicated, but deeply caring woman.

A Thousand and One is rich and complex overall, the saga of someone battling to build a family and a stable home with no real experience of what that looks like.

A Thousand and One paints a deeply felt portrait of maternal love and family.

The film brims with authenticity and the electrifying emotional intensity of the best melodramas.

This is not a movie that will leave you feeling especially warm and fuzzy – it is often devastating. But it’s also bursting with hope for the future in this deeply human story of how one woman decided to devote her life to ensuring that her son’s would be brighter.