The movie is a genuine inquiry into how animals experience the world.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 23, 2024

Kossakovsky's mesmerizing, gorgeous documentary about the life of a mother pig and her babies on an unnamed farm somewhere in the world serves as a bracing corrective to the way animals are usually portrayed on film.

| Aug 11, 2021

There is plenty of time to ponder the morality of our dominion over the beasts.A highly original, singularly beautiful film.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 15, 2021

Full of fascinating behavioural insights and moments that are both hilarious and adorable, this studied treatise on the personality and emotionality of domestic animals should provide plentiful food for thought.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 7, 2021

It's a must-watch but you'll probably never eat bacon again.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 7, 2021

To call the film meditative would be to undersell Kosakovskiy's instinct for drama and tension.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 6, 2021

What's so remarkable about Gunda is not only how beautifully Kossakovsky renders these humble surroundings, but how much drama he manages to excavate from the daily toing and froing of farmyard life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 4, 2021

The secret life of farm animals remains a secret, but a fascinating and even poignant one, in this strange and unexpectedly subtle film...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 3, 2021

The film is so patient as it holds up natural moments to the light, the result is that you end up really watching something else too - a minimalist epic, loaded with food for thought.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 2, 2021

This doesn't bring much new to the ethnographic animal doc format.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 2, 2021

Completely aside from its backstory and dietary moral, it is a piece of wondrously immersive filmmaking that invites us to slow down and consider life at its most elemental and - though this may sound corny in reference to a farm animal - humane.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 30, 2021

While Gunda exhibits tremendous empathy, it does not indulge in anthropomorphism or court sentimental responses. To further preempt such mawkishness, Kossakovsky shot it in b/w. The pink body of a piglet is thus less likely to elicit awwww than awe.

| Apr 26, 2021

Gunda may not technically be a silent film, but its expression through movement functions much the same way, with our minds filling in experiential gaps to create something that feels narratively whole.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 24, 2021

You'll feel like you're making new best friends when you watch "Gunda." It's as pure a farmyard experience as a movie can conceivably be.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 22, 2021

Gunda personalizes these animals without humanizing them, and evacuates explicit humanity without ignoring its clear impact.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 19, 2021

Beyond its value as a meditation on animal captivity and cruelty... this is a film that pays attention to things we've long neglected and to in-between interludes we have forgotten how to see.

| Apr 17, 2021

What it does express, in the most unadorned and ultimately affecting of ways, is the sentience of these creatures.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 16, 2021

"Gunda" ultimately falls somewhere between banal and profound. Maybe it's both. Kossokovsky... has grounded the nature film in a new movie terrain that for all its restraint, oozes empathy.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 16, 2021

A cinematic triumph of porcine poetry.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 15, 2021

The film is ultimately about bigger issues, to do with respect for the planet, but Kossakovsky has found a brilliant, emotional and daring way into those concerns.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 14, 2021