Far more sparse and metaphorical than the previous Refn and Gosling collaboration, but it's arguably much more visually lush, making for a challenging experience that showcases the filmmaker's cinematic sensibilities.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 20, 2023

Aside from Scott Thomas, whose performance is magnificently over-the-top, the actors and storyline have almost no humanity to them, serving only the film’s vague metaphor about punishment.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Sep 1, 2022

While Refn may not like strong narratives, deeper characters, or good dialogue he certainly loves mood lighting, long hallways, and gaudy wallpaper.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 24, 2022

Technically flawless but lacks any compelling reason to care about what's happening.

| Original Score: C | Sep 17, 2021

It's yet another case of something that is all style and no substance or point.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Apr 14, 2021

Immaculately designed and choreographed, the film looks and sounds fantastic. Its composition and colors all seem like house of cards at first, but its plasticity grows on you.

| Feb 24, 2021

This is a gorgeous film to look at, hypnotic in presentation, with a forceful, deliberate pace that propels you deeper and deeper into this dysfunctional criminal world.

| Original Score: A- | Jul 8, 2020

Although this criminal revenge drama seems absorbing in the visuals, it is hard to forgive him with its bland narrative. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 6/10 | Jun 25, 2020

Only God Forgives is a visually sumptuous feast, deliberate and controlled in its design, calculated to incite disturbing emotion and punctuated with a scene stealing performance by Kristin Scott Thomas.

| Nov 27, 2019

A 90 minute slog filled with bursts of unpleasant violence.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 19, 2019

Only God Forgives crackles with dense subtext. Even the karaoke, which seems like a joke at first, winds up playing like a prayer for absolution.

| Original Score: A | Aug 27, 2019

Only God Forgives is still pure Bangkok grit; all blood, neon and sleaze. But it's also a surprisingly languorous riff on the superficiality of genre cinema, using subverted iconography to examine the gulf between Eastern and Western sensibilities.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 26, 2019

Refn's return to form; an odd, exploitative, and arousing work.

| Jan 19, 2019

There's a vainglorious gratuity to the gory scenes in Only God Forgives that makes them, whisper it quietly...a touch boring.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Dec 8, 2018

This is style over substance at its worst. That's not to say that Only God Forgives lacks substance; the substance is just pretentiousness soaked in entrails and excrement.

| Original Score: 1.5/10 | Nov 1, 2018

There's something intoxicating about a film that manages to be both very violent and very pretty: it is unlike anything I've seen before, and in my book that is genius.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 8, 2018

Everything about Only God Forgives is either totally unpleasant or so weird and abstract it's obnoxious.

| Oct 21, 2017

Here's hoping Refn's next one redeems him.

| Original Score: D | Sep 7, 2017

Sensationalistic as it may be, with its repetitiveness and slow pacing, Only God Forgives feels embalmed.

| Aug 8, 2017

This is more a horror film than a martial arts extravaganza.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 14, 2016