Viggo's second collaboration with Cronenberg doesn't have the same juice as A History of Violence and the story would have benefitted from exploring the Krill character more, but the naked bath fight is a keeper!

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 2, 2025

Represented one of Cronenberg’s stronger periods, one with more mainstream success than the director has typically enjoyed. (15th anniversary)

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 19, 2022

Viggo Mortensen gives a fascinating performance in this dark and violent journey full of secrets, fidelity and family. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 18, 2022

The extras are all but perfunctory, but Kinos exquisite 4K transfer is easily the best that Eastern Promises has looked on home video to date.

| Apr 25, 2022

Beyond the film's eroticized violence and secretive world among the brutal Russian gangsters, Cronenberg also tells an immigrant story about people who want a better life only to find their desire exploited.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 4, 2022

Full of whispery menace, marked by probing studies of masculinity at its extreme boundaries, punctuated with bursts of sexual and violent excess, and coping with an abrupt ending.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 1, 2022

The dark and brooding world of the Russian Mafia makes for thrilling movie material - and the jumping point for a contemporary gangster epic.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 24, 2020

An intricate and mesmerizing thriller, featuring stellar performances (especially by Mortensen, who gives the bravest performance of his career) and an excellent script by Steven Knight

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 5, 2019

Despite the problems with the characterisations, Cronenberg's portentous, withholding camera creates a compelling tension around Watts and Mortensen's love/hate scenes.

| Oct 12, 2018

Such are the actual subtleties of Mortensen's performance - the odd sardonic smile; the slight tightening of a look - you're aware, from the off, that what he is on the outside might not have anything to do with what he is on the inside.

| Aug 23, 2018

Eastern Promises is a fascinating case of a film made under the intense gaze of a supreme auteur and written by the separate but equally potent hand of a writer.

| Oct 2, 2017

Knight throws in a twist that scrambles the movie's moral compass so late in the game, so perfunctorily and so pointlessly, as to render any final reckoning incoherent.

| Aug 24, 2017

Quite possibly the best film of the year, it is to be seen at all costs.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 14, 2011

David Cronenberg's spin on "The Departed," in which lawmen and the lawless were similarly tested within an ethnic mafia's ranks. But where that became an overwrought bloodbath, "Promises" maintained a vicious focus on mob malevolence and personal peril.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 25, 2010

"It starts very well, and we're immediately drawn into this world of dead pregnant teens, the Russian mob, the hermeneutics of tattoos and the archetypal disappointment of a father with his son."

| Original Score: A- | Sep 2, 2010

Clearly a companion piece to (and just as good as, if not better than) 2005's fantastic A History of Violence, Eastern Promises is all about blood, in the familial as well as the literal sense.

| Original Score: 8.5/10 | Jun 10, 2010

Even if the frequently low-key plot suffers from the occasional sleepy stretch, Mortensen turns in a magnificent performance.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 23, 2009

Late-period Cronenberg masterpiece

| Aug 27, 2009

Mortensen is very convincing as Nikolai, and his Russian accent is impeccable.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 18, 2008

Un ejemplo de cine negro contemporáneo realizado y narrado con gran precisión. Excelente elenco donde se destaca la notable labor de Viggo Mortensen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 3, 2008