Hlynur Palmáson again draws out the beauty and formidability of the Icelandic landscape in Godland, a journey of intense soul-searching and religious doubt.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 13, 2024

Godland is like an exquisite neoclassical painting: its drawn subject may not always convince and may even perplex with its metaphorical ambiguity, but the painting’s overall theme and its master’s brushstrokes still simply awe.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 28, 2024

Hove portrays the priest who loses his faith from the isolation and his inability to communicate with the locals. The landscape and Maria von Hausswolff's cinematography bring those qualities home.

| Mar 18, 2024

[A transfixing] meditation on the lingering impact of colonialism on the people of Iceland.

| Feb 13, 2024

Set in the harsh climes of 19th-century Iceland, writer-director Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland is a flinty yet majestic drama of colonial arrogance, faith, human frailty and photography.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 8, 2023

While I appreciate Pálmason’s scope and ambition and admire his austere and contemplative style, I found the experience to be more of a slog than the transfixing epic it should have been.

| Original Score: C | Dec 2, 2023

No doubt Palmason will keep working to achieve a film that strikes that elusive balance of pace and pitch. He’s so close now.

| Sep 21, 2023

Godland may not be a masterpiece, but it is an increasingly rare example of contemplative cinema, only this time it hides its poisonous stinger in beauty and lies until it becomes capable of piercing you... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 7, 2023

I want to say that this is nearly a perfect film but there are a couple of inconsistencies that I just can't ignore.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 26, 2023

Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason surprises us with a western that is as classic as it is unorthodox, hypnotic, dazzling and rabidly scathing. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 18, 2023

Two words: rug up. With its bone-seeping cold and torrential waters, 19th-century Iceland is vastly unforgiving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2023

A beguiling film from first frame to last.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 17, 2023

Like all the best movies, we can’t tell where this is going. When it arrives, the finale is worthy of all that has come before. Nobody makes movies like this any more -- except that some do.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 17, 2023

Godland is a sophisticated psychological drama that is photographed with an enormous amount of skill and attention to detail.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 13, 2023

Somehow, despite its 'vintage' appearance, Godland openly challenges the wounds of contemporary cinema and the world. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 11, 2023

Godland, cinematically, also shows us our smallness before a supreme screen. [Full review in Spanish]

| Aug 11, 2023

At all times physical and spiritual, austere and spectacular, beautiful and terrifying. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 10, 2023

The road to hell looking for an inexistent god. In some ways, a geopolitical film. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 10, 2023

Godland’s nature is brutal and unforgiving, carried by Hlynur Pálmason’s muscular yet poetic directorial hand and Maria von Hausswolff’s ravishing cinematography.

| Original Score: A | Jul 25, 2023

You’d be hard pressed to find a more immersive Winter Wonderland experience than Godland.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023