... The sepia color palette leaves little room for hope. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 29, 2023

...a long, surreal, mesmerizing elevator ride with Ventura and a faceless, scary soldier with a rifle. The nightmarish scene can be interpreted as Costa's therapy session for Ventura, exorcising his past demons that he desperately wants to do without.

| Feb 21, 2021

Costa's grim, joyless filmmaking is useful at communicating one or two emotions. This is not a film taken from life. The director is too obviously striving to impress.

| Feb 12, 2021

While Horse Money offers little in the way of absolution or edification, it's also a strikingly beautiful and touching work, no less invested in human fragility than institutional rot.

| Feb 4, 2020

For now I can only admire Horse Money from a distance, a feeling that leaves me more disappointed than elated.

| Jun 15, 2019

It's a singular and deeply resonant work that finds a mesmerizing poetry amidst the chiaroscuro rubble of post-colonial Portugal.

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

[A] sculptural, molded and moving film. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 14, 2019

I found watching this work to be as pleasurable as watching a rock on a table. It was, yes, beautiful at times, and the face of the main character is impressive, but Horse Money seemed to go on and on.

| Aug 23, 2018

There's no denying the artistry, with strikingly lit and framed compositions, but Horse Moneys opacity proves frustrating.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Oct 31, 2016

Seeing this movie is like if film history happening before your eyes. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 13, 2016

As someone who has reinvigorated the art of docufiction in his own quiet, minimal way, Costa's films are meticulous in their representation of the real, which comes into a bit of a tussle with the abstract nature of Horse Money

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 14, 2016

Horse Money is likely the Costa film that best exemplifies the influence of classical Hollywood genre cinema on his work.

| Original Score: A | Mar 12, 2016

This Portugese oddity represents arthouse film-making taken to insanely inscrutable heights.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 2, 2016

I felt like an outsider watching this film. I felt like I was invited to watch this world, but I wasn't invited into this world, this culture.

| Original Score: C | Jan 28, 2016

The director has plenty of influences, Stanley Kubrick and Old Hollywood classicists such as John Ford among them. But his style is his own: exacting, but dreamlike.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 14, 2016

Tableau succeeds tableau, connections elided, meaning elusive. There is poetry and there is impatience. There are silences.

| Jan 7, 2016

All plot synopses are necessarily attenuations, but for Horse Money any summary feels especially futile, or even violent, a crude reduction of its complex network of impossible geographies, fuzzy memories, and jumbled chronologies.

| Dec 7, 2015

Best to let the film's mesmerising tableaux descend upon you in the dreamy darkness, then sift its haunting memories for precise meaning in the hours, days and weeks that follow.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2015

E even within the context of such unevenness, Costa's commitment to chronicling and implicitly dignifying the sufferings of the oppressed and the exploited provides Horse Money with a solid core.

| Sep 18, 2015

Horse Money is hermetic to the point of being baffling, but in its dream-like way it is atmospheric and intriguing.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2015