Valhalla Rising 2009

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: It's a chilly, often slow, uncompromisingly harsh film, but Refn's images will sear your retinas. Read more

Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: It feels like a Black Sabbath song come to visual life. Read more

John Anderson, Wall Street Journal: It's a trip into a primordial world and primeval sensibilities, and if you're looking to shake off the mall-movie blahs, there are few better places to look. Read more

Scott Tobias, AV Club: Like a John Milius film reduced to its pure, masculine essence and shot through one of Alejandro Jodorowsky's lens filters. Read more

Ty Burr, Boston Globe: If only the pieces added up to an experience that sticks and that didn't finally succumb to a shrug of entropy. Read more

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: When it comes to crazy, violent, semidelirious, testosterone-laden, proto-Viking tales about a mute visionary one-eyed warrior who breaks skulls, Valhalla Rising is pretty great. Read more

Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger: It's Herzog deconstructed and reconstructed, amped up and slowed down -- like the way '60s band Vanilla Fudge used to take Top 40 hits and drag them out for most of an album side. Read more

Mike Hale, New York Times: Mr. Refn, who can pull off stylish brutality (in the Pusher films and Bronson), shows no knack for the kind of visionary, hallucinatory image making that would render Valhalla Rising memorable. Read more

Rex Reed, New York Observer: Valhalla Rising is nothing more than an updated version of the kind of time-honored Hollywood Viking movie Kirk Douglas used to do in his sleep, which means lots of inhuman, bone-crunching violence and no plot. Read more

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com: Lots of movies about the Middle Ages can do the mud and blood -- though we sure see a lot of both here -- but in this movie it's like Refn has ripped you out of time and dropped you there. Read more

Nigel Floyd, Time Out: The breathtaking digital photography and an atmospheric electronic score sustain the mood, and for those who see this savage journey through to the end, there are riches aplenty. Read more

Aaron Hillis, Village Voice: Mesmerizing ... A trippy nightmare of savage poetry burning slow across bleak and otherworldly landscapes. Read more

Vadim Rizov, Village Voice: A movie as maddeningly ponderous and self-important as its black-metal title. Read more