Director Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix unite to deliver an audacious odyssey for the titular main character

★★★☆☆ Sometimes, it’s tough being really skilled at one thing in particular. Having flown out the blocks with two supremely good, bonafide hit horror films (Hereditary, Midsommar), writer and director Ari Aster had to make a departure to avoid being pigeon-holed as a genre specialist.

Peter Travers reviews "Beau Is Afraid," starring Joaquin Phoenix, out April 21.

Joaquin Phoenix stars in A24's three-hour sprawl of angst and despair from Ari Aster, the director of Hereditary and Midsommar. It's a "bewildering folly", writes Nicholas Barber.

Richard Brody reviews “Beau Is Afraid,” directed by Ari Aster and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Patti LuPone, Amy Ryan, and Nathan Lane.

There is a succinct, incredible moment of catharsis at the conclusion of Ari Aster’s feature debut Hereditary when one of its beleaguered, terrified protagonists makes the break-neck decision to defenestrate themselves rather than endure the horrors to come. Three features into his career, Aster has not only made a name for himself as an inventive

'Beau Is Afraid' traces, to cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a troubled, intense man trying to get home in Ari Aster's disturbing 'Beau Is Afraid.' Amy Ryan and Patti LuPone also star.

Our Beau is Afraid review looks at the strange, funny new movie starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Ari Aster.

Ari Aster adeptly juggles the sort of laughs you get from Samuel Beckett with the sort you encounter in Mel Brooks

‘Hereditary’ director Ari Aster, never a horror guy, has left the genre behind for ‘Beau is Afraid’ — so why does his new film feel less open?

“This is the stuff of Kafka, of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, or of those recurring dreams you have where you simply can’t get to the corner shop because something always gets in the damn way — except filtered through an American comic sensibility equally indebted to Charlie Kaufman and Mel Brooks.”

The “Joker” actor has been doing singular work for three decades.

Ari Aster’s follow-up to ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommar’ is a drawn-out, paranoid spiral

Ari Aster's "Beau is Afraid" is an inscrutable thriller scripted and directed with the confidence of a filmmaker whose "Hereditary" and "Midsommer" upped the intellectual ante on modern horror, but edited with the audacity of a Next Big Thing who's been reading his own glowing reviews. It's a cumbersome, ungainly journey through phobias and mommy…

A surreal three-hour dive into writer/director Ari Aster’s anxieties, Beau Is Afraid is a deeply personal horror-comedy at a wildly ambitious scale.

Writer-director Ari Aster follows the much-applauded ‘Hereditary’ and ‘Midsommar’ with a $35mn Oedipal odyssey

Beau may be afraid but Ari Aster certainly isn't. Of the many words used to describe the writer-director's previous two films — “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” — timidity was never of them.

Ari Aster’s black comedy about malign maternal influence is full of cod-psychology that makes Psycho look like a Mother’s Day card.

Anthony Lane reviews Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid,” starring Joaquin Phoenix, and “Everything Went Fine,” François Ozon’s depiction of an assisted suicide.

Ari Aster's singular Beau is Afraid is deeply funny, horrifying and staunchly esoteric.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a hapless middle-aged man on a tortuous journey to see his mum in the Midsommar director’s three-hour black comedy of Oedipal angst

Not a whole lot makes sense in "Beau Is Afraid" and that's sort of the bizarre beauty of Joaquin Phoenix's dark comedy about an epic trip back home.