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

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

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

It's an unforgettable movie yet one whose meanings seem to lie just beyond reach, and it marks the arrival of a new filmmaker whose roots tap into something unfathomably old.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 23, 2023

The film is an effectively somber, despairing meditation on faith, vanity, and colonialism. While much of his film is austere, Pálmason employs a few flashy techniques to enhance the eerie mood of existential unease.

| May 9, 2023

[Leaves] the viewer with a sense of being engulfed by a landscape in which cultures collide – the incarnate and the infinite forever butting heads, neither willing to concede hard-won ground.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 9, 2023

The paltry comforts of organised religion in the face of nature is the subject of this spectacular epic...

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

If a film this filled with indelible images needs a mission statement, there it is: the eternal double-edge of things.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 6, 2023

I left the cinema dazed and elated by its artistry; it is breathtaking in its epic scale, magnificent in its comprehension of landscape, piercingly uncomfortable in its human intimacy and severity.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 5, 2023

Another elliptical and elemental treat from one of Europe’s great new filmmakers.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 4, 2023

While the movie’s visuals ably conjure the natural world, its plot is often artificial and contrived.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Mar 13, 2023

Maria von Hausswolff’s cinematography astounds, though the gimmickry of the image framing—soft, rounded edges, like those of an old photograph—mirrors the superfluous avidity of Pálmason’s direction.

| Mar 3, 2023

[GODLAND is] absolutely breathtaking work – the camera helmed by Maria von Hausswolff captures the unassuming beauty of Iceland, but also does not hide its frigid nature, both terrifying and beautiful.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 2, 2023

With Godland, Pálmason has enlisted us for a voyage of visual splendor, as terrifying as it is breathtaking, and divine contemplation.

| Original Score: A- | Feb 3, 2023

This richly realized, meditative and invigorating saga makes clear: plans are the folly of man, the workings of survival are infinitely more mysterious.

| Feb 3, 2023

One secret of this extraordinary film, and of its power to exhilarate: the shock of emotional vigor, arising from the continual rub of physical texture and effort.

| Feb 3, 2023

There’s just enough room for viewers to wander about Godland and maybe even get lost in its pregnant pauses thanks to Maria von Hausswolff’s stunning cinematography.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 3, 2023

The film’s unifying theme is the egocentrism and inevitable violence of masculinity.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 1, 2023

This transfixing drama is certainly austere. But there’s also a marvelously odd vein of sneaky humor running through it, along with an unpredictability that keeps you glued.

| May 27, 2022

[A] steadily gripping, often mordantly funny movie...

| May 25, 2022

An engrossing account of a voyage to the dark side of permanent daylight.

| May 25, 2022