You don’t often come away from a film thinking that there’s not much else that’s quite like, but you just might come away from Santa Sangre with that feeling...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 6, 2024

A sumptuous feast for the eyes wrapped around a tragic character study, Santa Sangre is not to be missed.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 5, 2024

Santa Sangre’s themes of empathy and hope are uniquely personal for Jodorowsky, and they help bring the film’s horrors and bloodshed into perspective…

| Jan 9, 2024

Undoubtedly the definitive word on Jodorowsky's celebrated surreal serial killer picture. A big recommendation.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 29, 2021

The love child of Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini (with a [****] by David Lynch for good measure).

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 23, 2021

It just seems timeless. It's a beautiful story and... it's so powerful and you can tell how much passion and love went into this film.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Oct 22, 2020

A trip that was calculated carefully, the near constant use of slightly off-key circus music adding to its hypnotic quality.

| Feb 28, 2019

Whether or not this is the most accessible of Jodorowsky's films... it is certainly the most accessible "Jodorowksy film," a vision filled with circus imagery, surreal scenes, grotesque violence and psycho-sexual trauma.

| Aug 4, 2017

You can say this: It is never boring.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 15, 2013

Santa Sangre's content puts it beyond the call of duty for even the most slavishly devoted art-house denizen.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 15, 2013

While it's not especially easy viewing, and unquestionably not for all tastes, Santa Sangre is exhilarating, challenging, enigmatic and distressing, but entirely rewarding and entertaining.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Nov 15, 2013

More extravagant, but less controlled than his infamous allegorical western, El Topo.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 15, 2013

What's probably most amazing about Santa Sangre is that most of it works, and almost never does it feel like it's being unsettling just for the sake of it.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 15, 2013

The most accessible film by Mexican avant-garde auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky, his horror head-scratcher divides its time between the sanitarium and the circus.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 15, 2013

What Jodorowsky lacks is a sense of humor, in the absence of which his films turn ludicrous.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 15, 2013

Drawing on his training in mime and his fascination with Gnosticism, Jodorowsky converted a story about a bizarre murderer into a grand work of art, full of symbols and imagery that reach beyond language to something primal and original.

| Original Score: A- | Nov 26, 2012

When one discusses the artform's icons, Alejandro Jodorowsky must be mentioned.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Nov 26, 2012

Visionary and haunting, Santa Sangre is a mixture of blood poetry and gobbledygook that keeps springing astonishingly to life.

| Nov 26, 2012

Santa Sangre has ample affection for outcasts and much to say about religious hypocrisy.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 25, 2012

Not as good as his previous El Topo, but pretty eye-opening all the same.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 21, 2012