[Filmmaker Aleksei] German exalts the grotesque sensuality of Arkanar with a visual style that surpasses the expressiveness of Khrustalyov, My Car! [Full review in Spanish]

| Dec 9, 2021

Those welcoming the sensation of being overwhelmed will relish German's uncompromising vision.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 27, 2020

Aleksei German's immersive cinematic vision is like the mucky, muddy parts of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" scrutinized, lionized, and revitalized to the nth degree -- call it The Knights Who Say "Nyet!"

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 23, 2020

This is hardcore art-house cinema and not for the impatient or squeamish, but many images and performances keep haunting you afterwards.

| Jan 11, 2020

Hard to Be a God, to say the least, can be seen as a flexible metaphor for the unchanging state of both Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.

| Oct 30, 2019

Every second feels authentic, like looking into a completely different yet fully realized world.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jun 7, 2019

A cinematic behemoth, an unshakable monochrome nightmare of squelching bodily discharges that inhabits a world so noxious you can almost smell the pungent deterioration of humanity as it spews forth from the screen.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 3, 2019

An allegory of Russian barbarism.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 28, 2018

It may be unpleasant to watch, but despite technically being science fiction it's powerful and real.

| Feb 16, 2018

There's something completely mesmerising about it, caught not least in the stunning cinematography of Vladimir Ilyin and Yury Klimenko, which transforms our expectations of black-and-white into a remarkable symphony of grey.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 21, 2017

Logic melts away on this phantasmagorical trip into a fog-shrouded, mud-encrusted universe.

| Aug 21, 2017

The nastiness is so intricate, so monumentally revolting, that it inspires a perverse new reverence, or gratitude, for the real world into which you will soon be able to escape.

| Aug 17, 2017

Hard To Be A God is an experience, and the film is so richly textured and devotedly realized that it rocks you into a hypnotic trance that can only be seen to be believed.

| Dec 6, 2016

It gets uncommonly dense narrative and thematic mileage out of things that would apparently have nothing to do with narrative or theme, like camera movement and squelchy, wet production design.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jul 10, 2016

Hard to Be a God is the perfection of the director's long-take approach, likely to remain unmatched for years to come.

| Original Score: A- | Jun 6, 2016

A profoundly, wilfully destabilising experience.

| Jan 15, 2016

We are shown that the world is a cesspool, in repetitive detail, for three hours. It's an incredible-looking and -sounding immersion, but not quite a conversation.

| Dec 21, 2015

Bewildering, darkly hilarious, something of an endurance test, and made with such epic scale and precision that it's also breathtaking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2015

The result may be an awe-inspiring folly rather than a fully realised masterpiece, but it's radically out of the ordinary.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 9, 2015

Oblique and dense in a manner that makes those other great Strugatsky-inspired films look like Star Wars episodes, the film relentlessly hammers out humanity's propensity for barbarism.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 8, 2015